Defect Detection Capabilities of Pulse Compression Based Infrared Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation

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 experimentation time 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.