Thermochromic liquid crystals and true colour image processing in heat transfer and fluid-flow research

In the last five years or so, true-colour image processing has gone being available mainly to highly technical users on expensive image processing systems to being used by virtually anyone who can use a desktop computer. Also, during the past 25 years, liquid crystals have emerged as reliable temperature sensors for heat transfer research, and have been applied in a number of situations to visualise the temperature distribution under complex flow fields. In this study the true-colour image processing of the liquid crystal (LC) images was developed successfully and applied to the study of heat and mass transfer problems. The history of this technique is reviewed and principal methods are described and some examples are presented.