Infrared non-destructive testing and evaluation for inspection of carbon fiber reinforced polymer materials

Abstract

Infrared non-destructive testing and evaluation is one of the most promising inspection methods for evaluating variety of materials due to its merits such as remote based, whole field, safe and quantitative inspection capabilities. Among the various infrared non-destructive evaluation methods, pulse based thermography and mono frequency excited modulated lock-in thermography gained importance due to their simple experimentation procedure and data processing approaches involved. However, recently proposed matched filter based non-periodic infrared thermographic approaches gained importance due to their superior sub-surface defect identification capabilities in terms of detection resolution and sensitivity. The present work demonstrates the merits of pulse compression favorable thermal wave imaging approach for identification of flat bottom holes in a carbon fiber reinforced polymer material.