Thermographic image processing analysis in a solar concentrator with hard C-means clustering

Thermographic measurements are used to determine the temperatures reached by the focus of a modified Fresnel solar concentrator, where a container is placed to take advantage of this energy. The three steps of this investigation are: (i) the edges of each thermographic image are obtained by means of a Butterworth low-pass filter, (ii) the temperature grid in the solar concentrator is obtained by means of a feature extraction algorithm, and finally: (iii) the classification will be done through a C-means hard clustering algorithm selecting the center of each cluster to accurately find the temperature region to generate the isotherms and extract the temperatures with this algorithm. With the hard C-means algorithm, isotherm level curves and temperature graphs are obtained. Subsequently, two analyzes are carried out to validate that the original unprocessed thermographic images correspond spatially and in their spectrum with the processed images, with the aim of corroborating the acuteness of the digital image processing methodology implemented in this research. Finally, a correlation analysis is performed to validate the temperature matches of the original thermographic images. (c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CCBY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).