Developed by research engineers at the Fire Safety Research Institute, part of UL Research Institutes, HFITS is a software tool that is intended to support experimental measurements of heat flux over planar surfaces using infrared thermography. This technique enables spatially and temporally resolved heat flux measurements at a greater resolution than arrays of traditional point sensors. The target audience is researchers and engineers in thermal engineering disciplines.
HFITS consists of two main components: pre-processing of infrared thermograms (obtained from heat transfer experiments), and inverse heat transfer analysis (to deduce heat flux over the planar surface in those experiments). The software offers comprehensive functionalities, including support for custom thermogram formats, metadata handling, a graphical interface for selection of regions of interest, the ability to import additional temperature measurements to enhance convective heat transfer estimates, and the exporting of both computed field data and contour videos. Please refer to the software MANUAL for additional information.
This software has been made available to the community under the GPL-3.0 license. It is under active development, and users are encouraged to contact the software developers with questions and feature requests.