Non-destructive soil inspection using an efficient 3D software-hardware heat equation solver

Soil inspection by means of non-destructive evaluation (NDE) methods constitutes a subject of great research interest with practical implications beyond a particular domain of application. NDE methods often require the modelling of physical phenomena involving complex sets of equations whose computational solution has demanding requirements in terms of memory and computing power. One case of particular importance is that of the heat transfer equation, present in multiple situations. In this article, we will focus on NDE for soil inspection, with a particular application on the detection of shallowly buried antipersonnel mines in sandy soils. To this aim, a quasi-inverse procedure for the estimation of the depth of burial of the mine targets, and a full-inverse procedure for the characterization of the physical properties of other targets will be proposed. The efficient computational solution of these procedures is ensured via a software–hardware heat equation solver presented here.

keywords: Non-destructive evaluation, inverse problems, landmine detection, dynamic IR thermography, thermal modelling, FPGA