Growing bored with maintaining a vast array of fragile thermocouples, I investigated ways in which the local heat transfer performance could be measured using thermography.
Here is an image which illustrates the possibility of making ‘remote’ temperature measurements to within +/- 0.1° C (advances in the imaging equipment now allow far greater precision).
I then spent some time attempting to correlate the temperature distribution with the distribution of vapour production (derived from analysis of the recorded boiling films). This sparked my interest in image processing, but had limited success as a design tool.