Pulse Compression Favorable Thermal Wave Imaging Techniques for Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation of Materials

This article highlights the application of pulse compression favorable Frequency Modulated Thermal Wave Imaging (FMTWI) technique for testing and evaluation of Carbon Fibre Reinforced Plastics (CFRP). The concept of InfraRed Image Correlation (IRIC) has been introduced to reconstruct the correlation fringes for the pulse compressed data obtained from the matched filter approach to detect the flat bottom hole defects in a CFRP specimen. Further, comparison has been made with the acquired phasegrams using frequency and time domain based data processing approaches. Obtained results clearly demonstrate the strengths of the proposed IRIC based post-processing scheme in providing the spatio-temporal correlation fringes for thermal Non-Destructive Testing & Evaluation (NDT&E) of CFRP materials.