Abstract:
Infrared Thermography is one of the widely used
method for non-destructive testing and evaluation methods
due to its merits (remote, full field, safe and quantitative
inspection capabilities) for testing and evaluation of wide
variety of materials (metals, semiconductors and composites). Among the various thermal non-destructive evaluation
modalities such as pulse based and mono frequency excited
modulated lock-in thermography, recently proposed matched
filter based non-periodic infrared thermographic approaches
gained their importance due to superior test resolution and
sensitivity for detection of defects hidden inside the test
material. Further, feasibility to implement with low peak power
heat sources in moderate experimentationtime in comparison
with conventional (pulse based thermographic techniques and in a limited span of time in comparison with mono
frequency lock-in) thermographic techniques makes these pulse compression favorable techniques more economical
and reliable. The present manuscript demonstrates the advantages of pulse compression favorable frequency modulated
thermal wave imaging approach for identification of flat bottom holes in a glass fibre reinforced polymer material. The
obtained results have been compared with widely used principal component thermography by taking the signal to noise
ratio as a figure of merit.
