Measuring how fast towels dry using an infra-red camera

For Dutch, see leesmij.md

How fast do different brands of towels dry? A dutch television program asked me to come up with a measurement to determine if "fast drying towels" do indeed dry faster than regular (cotton) towels.

To analyse this I conducted an experiment using an thermal (FLIR) camera aimed at towels while they were drying. This repository contains all the jupyter notebooks I made to explain the experiment, analyse the data and draw conclusions. The experiment was conducted four times, each experiment has its own notebook. The notebook for the second experiment, called TowelMeasurement2.ipynb is fully documented in English, where the notebook for the first experiment is documented in Dutch. The notebooks for the third and fourth experiment are only lightly documented.

The raw video data captured during the experiments is too large to share on Github (20GB), so can be downloaded from Zenodo here: Note that the temperature data is saved seperatly as a pickle file, so the video does not need to be downloaded if one only wants to work with the results.

The video analyses used in the notebooks can potentially be useful for others working with thermal cameras. When using or building on this software, please use the following citation:

Finally, the results of the first experiment were turned into a gif that I'm rather proud of, so I'm posting it here as well :-)