Efficient software-hardware 3D heat equation solver with applications on the non-destructive evaluation of minefields
This paper targets the efficient computational solution of the heat transfer processes that take place in the soil and at the soil-air interface and its use in non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques. In particular, the problem of the detection of plastic antipersonnel mines is considered. To this aim we projected a 3D finite-difference (FD) thermal model of the soil on a FPGA platform using Handel-C and VHDL A speedup factor of 34 over a purely software solution is achieved, obtaining processing times that permit the use of the system on the field. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
non-destructive evaluation (nde) application accelerator finite-difference (fd) method field programmable gate array (fpga) hardware accelerator integer arithmetic infrared (ir) thermography