Proceedings Article | 10 May 2011
KEYWORDS: Thermography, Nondestructive evaluation, Composites, Infrared radiation, Lamps, Defect detection, Thermal modeling, Infrared cameras, Active optics, Material characterization
Thermographic approaches, passive and active, are widely used due to the outstanding advantages that offer in a
number of applications and particularly for the assessment of materials. Nonetheless, there are limitations; depending
upon the approach used, as well as on the materials thermal, optical and physical properties, proper assessment
(detection and/or quantification) is feasible. In thermal non-destructive evaluation (NDE), the active approach of
infrared thermography where an excitation source, such as optical flash lamps, heat lamps, hot or cold air guns, etc., is
employed with the intention of inducing thermal contrasts, has several applications. The temperature differences during
the transient phase appear on the material surface and so detection of subsurface defects is possible (areas of different
temperatures when compared to the sound part(s) due to the different thermal diffusivity). Since the heating or cooling
features of the stimulus source are identifiable (in time and amplitude) by considering the time factor quantitative
assessment is also feasible. However, when a material is heated, the thermal waves penetrate the material's surface.
These waves are generally of various amplitudes and frequencies and are launched into the specimen, in a transient
mode (i.e. transient thermography). In this work, different applications, employing transient thermographic testing,
concerning the assessment of various composite materials and components are presented. Real time NDE is presented
using various transient thermography approaches, i.e. pulsed thermography (PT), pulsed phase thermography (PPT)
and/or thermal modelling (TM).
