FLIR MIX: Accelerating and Improving Your R&D Insights
By Matt Hasty
FLIR MIXTM represents a significant advancement in multispectral imaging technology. It combines high speed, high performance infrared and visible light imagery into a single, synchronized data file that ensures precise spatial and temporal alignment.
This innovation is designed to enhance research and development across various fields by providing clearer insights into thermal environments. Researchers often use both visible and infrared imagery, as each spectral band reveals unique discoveries.
Here are some key benefits of FLIR MIX and its transformative impact on research and development:
A MIX shot of a champagne cork as it pops (thermal + visible)
Accelerate Research and Development
FLIR MIX significantly accelerates the research and development process by making it easy to control the visible and infrared camera from a single laptop. It enables researchers to align imagers temporally and spatially with ease, with all the data saved to one file for future analysis. This capability allows users to quickly capture data and compare different bands, leading to faster discoveries.
Whether tracking material stress, designing electronics, testing batteries, or capturing high-speed impacts, researchers can focus on discovery rather than fixing misaligned data.
Improve Insights and Understanding
Combining visible and infrared imagery gives researchers a comprehensive view of their subjects, enhancing the spectrum of data available for analysis. This additional data, which requires minimal setup, can lead to better designs, higher quality, and breakthrough discoveries.
Visible light imagery captures the structural and visual details of objects such as shapes, textures, and deformation over time, which are easily recognizable to the human eye. Infrared imagery, on the other hand, detects thermal patterns and heat signatures invisible to the naked eye, essential for understanding heat distribution, thermal anomalies, and material changes.
Increase Accuracy and Precision
Before FLIR MIX, researchers spent countless hours and resources developing their own solutions, which many university and commercial labs could not afford. The alternative was to reference both datasets, or to correlate the data manually.
Now, with this turnkey solution, researchers have easy access to multispectral data. This data is inherently more accurate and precise, thanks to FLIR's proprietary software and hardware solutions.
Modify and Combine Data
The Research Studio FLIR MIX Toolkit is a powerful tool that allows users to combine visible and infrared imagery both in real-time on live data or after testing in post-processing. This toolkit enables users to align .TIFF visible files and infrared .ATS files temporally and spatially, even using existing visible cameras to mix multispectral data post-acquisition.
While the recommended method is to use a FLIR hardware starter kit for the easiest setup and most straightforward results, FLIR Research Studio is designed for flexibility, accommodating the way researchers work. This flexibility and advanced features make FLIR Research Studio the tool of choice in research labs globally.
Here are a few examples where both visible and infrared improve insight and helps the research or quality team be more efficient:
Ping Pong Ball and Flame: Visible imagery clearly shows the ball, while midwave infrared shows the flame but not the ball. Blending high-speed infrared with high-speed visible imagery allows users to see both the ball and flame.
Electronics Design and Testing: Users can view a visual picture or board layout while accessing real-time temperature data per pixel. FLIR MSX® highlights the infrared stream with details from the visual picture, making it easy to identify overheating components.
Renewable Energy: Visible streams of solar panels show physical damage, while infrared reveals hotspots. Combining both imaging types allows for detailed visualization of dynamic processes.
Airbag Testing: Researchers can observe the deployment mechanism and thermal behavior simultaneously, providing a complete picture of the event.
Conclusion
FLIR MIX accelerates research and development, improves insight and understanding, and increases accuracy and precision for researchers worldwide. It also offers flexibility in data modification and combination, catering to the core needs of advanced researchers. This multispectral tool is transformative in research and development, and its presence in labs and test ranges around the world is highly anticipated.
