Abstract:In the last few years, induction thermography has been established as a non-destructive testing method for localizing surface cracks in metals. The sample to be inspected is heated with a short induced electrical current pulse, and the infrared camera records-during and after the heating pulse-the temperature distribution at the surface. Transforming the temporal temperature development for each pixel to phase information makes not only highly reliable detection of the cracks possible but also allows an estimation of its depth. Finite element simulations were carried out to investigate how the phase contrast depends on parameters such as excitation frequency, pulse duration, material parameters, crack depth, and inclination angle of the crack. From these results, generalized functions for the dependency of the phase difference on all these parameters were derived. These functions can be used as an excellent guideline as to how measurement parameters should be optimized for a given material to be able to detect cracks and estimate their depth. Several experiments on different samples were also carried out, and the results compared with the simulations showed very good agreement.
Laminated composites are increasingly used in aeronautics and the wind energy industry, as well as in the automotive industry. In these applications, the construction and processing need to fulfill the highest requirements regarding weight and mechanical properties. Environmental issues, like fuel consumption and CO2-footprint, set new challenges in producing lightweight parts that meet the highly monitored standards for these branches. In the automotive industry, one main aspect of construction is the impact behavior of structural parts. To verify the quality of parts made from composite materials with little effort, cost and time, non-destructive test methods are increasingly used. A highly recommended non-destructive testing method is thermography analysis. In this work, a prototype for a car’s base plate was produced by using vacuum infusion. For research work, testing specimens were produced with the same multi-layer build up as the prototypes. These specimens were charged with defined loads in impact tests to simulate the effect of stone chips. Afterwards, the impacted specimens were investigated with thermography analysis. The research results in that work will help to understand the possible fields of application and the usage of thermography analysis as the first quick and economic failure detection method for automotive parts.
Subsurface defects can be detected by flash thermography evaluating the temperature response at the surface. Many techniques have been developed in the past to localise defects and also to estimate their depth and size. Two of the most established methods are TSR and PPT, whereby TSR analyses the data in the time domain, and PPT evaluates the signal in the frequency domain. In order to get the data in the frequency domain, Fourier transformation, especially FFT is used to calculate the phase shift for the different frequencies. The usage of FFT assumes a periodic signal or a temporal signal limited in time. As this is not the case for the temperature signal after a short pulse heating, the transformation to the frequency domain generates some errors. Therefore parameters as e.g. sampling frequency or time duration of evaluation have to be selected carefully. Even if many publications have been already dealing with this topic, in this paper a new approach is attempted by comparing the temporal behaviour as it is handled by the TSR technique with the frequency behaviour calculated by PPT. The results are interpreted with the help of simulation and measurements for flat bottom hole samples are also presented.
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