Influence of the errors in an infrared camera on the estimation of thermal conductivity and thermal capacity of a gypsum plaster sample

The present work studies how the errors of infrared cameras propagate during the estimation of thermophysical parameters. The errors in the camera were determined experimentally, and varied with both position and temperature. The thermal conductivity and thermal capacity were estimated by comparing the experimental and computational temperature evolution as a gypsum plaster sample was left to cool naturally in the air. For each study, one of the parameters was varied until the simulated temperature curve was adjusted to the experimental curve using the Levenberg–Marquardt Algorithm. We concluded that for the thermal capacity, there is a strong correlation between the error in the camera and the error of the parameter, which was not so clear in the case of the thermal conductivity. Another important conclusion is that the variation of the thermal conductivity presents a better adjustment of the curves even though the error in the estimated parameter was higher, indicating that reasonable results in the minimization process do not necessarily assure a good estimation. As a final conclusion, we stress the importance of using calibrated cameras, since in the extreme cases a mean deviation of 1.46 °C in the camera represented an error of 15% on the thermal capacity and a mean deviation of 0.81 °C in the camera represented an error of 25% on the thermal conductivity.