Depth resolved pulse compression favourable frequency modulated thermal wave imaging for quantitative characterization of glass fibre reinforced polymer

Abstract

InfraRed Thermography is an expeditiously growing non-destructive testing and evaluation technique widely used to estimate the subsurface defect details in fibre reinforced polymer materials due to its remote, fast, easy, safe and wide area monitoring abilities. In order to explore the details of subsurface anomalies in active infrared thermography, a modulated heat flux with a predefined intensity and bandwidth is employed to excite the test sample. Among various widely used active infrared thermographic techniques for non-destructive testing and evaluation applications, pulse based and modulated lock-in thermography are predominantly in use. However, these conventional techniques limits their applicability due to high peak power heat source requirements (pulse based techniques) and poor resolution (modulated lock-in thermography) for detecting the defects located at various depths of different lateral dimensions. The present paper highlights a pulse compression favourable frequency modulated thermal wave imaging which can be carried out with moderate peak power heat sources in a limited span of time with improved test resolution and sensitivity. Further the proposed experimentation is validated with the analytical as well as numerical simulations on glass fibre reinforced polymer samples having flat bottom hole defects.