A Thermal-imaging-based Method for 2D Electric Current Distribution Measurement

Measurement of electric current distribution is important for medicine, semiconductor, and structure integrity evaluation in nondestructive testing (NDT). Several electric measurement methods are developed, such as electrode array, coil and magnetic sensor. In this paper, the infrared (IR)-imaging-based method is proposed to capture the 2D electric current distribution. In this method, the current magnitude matrix is obtained by utilizing the relationship between the thermal field and the electric field. Furthermore, an iteration algorithm is proposed to reconstruct the direction of the current depending on the divergence theorem of passive field. Then the 2D electric current distribution can be visualized with high resolution and the results would verify the efficiency of the proposed method.