Super-Frequency Sampling for Thermal Transient Analysis

Abstract

Thermal transients of small or thermally well-conducting components typically relax with a very short time constant. In some cases, the fastest changes occur on a time scale of a few tens to hundreds of microseconds. Providing a sampling rate higher than 1 kHz is challenging, even for modern infrared cameras. This work presents a periodic non-uniform sampling technique for measuring thermographic transients, which increases the effective sampling rate by one order of magnitude to 10 kHz, resulting in a temporal resolution of 100 μs. The practical application of this technique captures parts of the thermal transient that would otherwise be missed for standard sampling rates. The results confirm the algorithm’s ability to enhance the effective sampling rate, providing a more detailed thermal analysis of rapid transient processes in small-scale electronic components.