Correction-free radiometry on specular spheres for containerless processing in microgravity

An analysis is presented that establishes how correction-free radiance measurements or pyrometry can be performed on targets in furnaces where there may be significant additional radiance from heated furnace walls or from reflecting surfaces close to the target. These configurations are common in microgravity and containerless processing applications where a specular target is radiantly heated in a hot-wall furnace, or inductively heated from the fields arising from nearby closely spaced electromagnetic coils. Proper design requires that the pyrometer does not view any images of the background features in the specular target so that stray radiation will not be reflected into the viewing optics of the pyrometer. To analyze the problem, conventional paraxial optics analysis is shown to be significantly in error. Instead a method of nonparaxial ray tracing, based on the derivatives of the ray paths, shows how the images must be located. This leads to analytical results that can be used to design such systems. The findings are applied to the furnace geometries that are presently being considered for flight in LEO.