Temperature measurements of high-temperature semi-transparent infrared material using multi-wavelength pyrometry

•Temperature measurement method of semi-transparent infrared material is developed.•Multi-wavelength pyrometry is used to determine interior temperature distribution.•Apparent spectral radiation properties of investigated ZnS material are analyzed.•Spectrum optimization of optical pyrometry for ZnS material are investigated.•Inversion temperature accuracy using optical pyrometry is good for applications.

Temperature measurements inside semi-transparent materials are important in many fields. This study investigates the measurements of interior temperature distributions in a one-dimensional semi-transparent material using multi-wavelength pyrometry based on the Levenberg–Marquardt method (LMM). The investigated material is semi-transparent Zinc Sulfide (ZnS), an infrared-transmitting optical material operating at long wavelengths. The radiation properties of the one-dimensional semi-transparent ZnS plate, including the effective spectral–directional radiation intensity and the proportion of emitted radiation, are numerically discussed at different wavelengths (8.0–14.0 μm) and temperature distributions (400–800 K) to provide the basic data for the temperature inversion problem. Multi-wavelength pyrometry was combined with the Levenberg–Marquardt method to resolve the temperature distribution along the radiative transfer direction based on the line-of-sight spectral radiation intensities at multiple wavelengths in the optimized spectral range of (11.0–14.0 μm) for the semi-transparent ZnS plate. The analyses of the non-linear inverse problem show that with less than 5.0% noise, the inversion temperature results using the Levenberg–Marquardt method are satisfactory for linear or Gaussian temperature distributions in actual applications. The analysis provides valuable guidelines for applications using multi-wavelength pyrometry for temperature measurements of semi-transparent materials.