Non-contact measurement of linear thermal expansion coefficients of solid materials by infrared image correlation

A new non-contact optical method (IIC, infrared image correlation) for the determination of the coefficients of thermal expansion of solid materials is presented. The proposed method is based on performing a digital image correlation between thermal images recorded at different temperatures by means of an infrared camera. It allows the coefficient of thermal expansion of both isotropic and anisotropic solid materials to be determined by measuring simultaneously the fractional increase in length and the actual thermal field over a small region of interest in which a dual-emissivity stochastic speckle pattern has been created. The results reported in this paper prove the effectiveness of the proposed method that can be applied either to carry out reference measurements in laboratory or to evaluate thermal stresses and strains on structural components in-field.