Abstract
In the context of non-destructive testing, quantification of uncertainty caused by various factors such as inspection technique, testing environment and the operator is important and challenge. This paper introduces a concept of contour-based confidence map and an application framework for pulsed thermography that offers enhanced flexibility and reliability of inspection. This approach has been successfully applied to detect three flat-bottom holes of diameter 32, 16 and 8 mm drilled onto a 5 mm thick aluminium plate with a high accuracy of damage detection (R > 0.97). Its suitability and effectiveness in assessing impact damage occurring in composites have also been demonstrated.
Highlights
Non-destructive testing (NDT) has been the front-runner in estimating the health of a component over the last few decades with specific emphasis on damage detection and quantification without causing further damage to the material
Whereas metallic components tend to produce a low SNR as evidenced by data from aluminium or steel, the Adaptive Peak Temperature Contrast method (APTC) is recommended. Another reason why APTC is preferred over Peak Temperature Contrast method (PTC) in this paper is that we aim to evaluate the confidence level for different defects in a single map, the way to produce the property of each pixel must follow a uniform rule
To enhance flexibility and reliability of NDT inspection, this paper introduced a concept of contour-based confidence map with its application framework for pulsed thermography
Summary
Non-destructive testing (NDT) has been the front-runner in estimating the health of a component over the last few decades with specific emphasis on damage detection and quantification without causing further damage to the material. Pulsed thermography inspection has been established as a reliable thermal NDT technique to detect near and sub-surface damage occurring in various materials. Understanding the uncertainty of defect/damage characterisation is important because that is the only way to mitigate the uncertainty associated with the inspection and improve the accuracy of the measurement through identifying the source of errors followed by corresponding actions. Thermal data acquisition is a challenging process where the technique's dependence is heavily based on primarily the infrared detection system followed by an appropriate heat excitation source. Most of the current stateof-the-art systems still employ equipment such as flash lamps These optical units are heavily dependent on capacitor bank systems where there is a level of uncertainty that exists in determining the flash initiation and end of flash and can only be monitored by a high frame rate infrared acquisition system. There is a strong demand to build the confidence level in results obtained from the thermographic inspection which becomes a driving factor to help establish and exploit the active thermal inspection method in the main stream inspection scenarios
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