Résumé
The deformation of solid materials is nearly always accompanied with temperature variations. These variations, governed by the heat diffusion equation stemming from the first and second laws of thermodynamics, are induced by intrinsic dissipation of energy and thermomechanical coupling. Infrared thermography techniques provide an experimental means for measuring thermal fields on specimen boundaries. But even if thermal fields are related to the material behavior they are not intrinsic to it as they also depend on external factors such as boundary conditions. Inverting boundary thermal fields is thus needed to obtain valid insight into the specimen thermomechanical behavior. Such an operation belongs to the class of source inverse problem. Inverse source problems are known to be ill-posed in the sense of Hadamard: their solution does not depend continuously on the data, and is not unique for a general source distribution when using only boundary measurements. Modeling hypotheses on the sought sources are thus needed to properly retrieve information.