Efficient software–hardware 3D heat equation solver with applications on the non-destructive evaluation of minefields

This paper targets the efficient computational solution of the heat transfer processes that take place in the soil and at the soil–air interface and its use in non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques. In particular, the problem of the detection of plastic antipersonnel mines is considered. To this aim we projected a 3D finite-difference (FD) thermal model of the soil on a FPGA platform using Handel-C and VHDL. A speedup factor of 34 over a purely software solution is achieved, obtaining processing times that permit the use of the system on the field.