Independent component analysis for pulse compressed frequency modulated thermal wave imaging for inspection of mild steel

Abstract

Non-destructive testing & evaluation plays a crucial role in various sectors for testing the reliability of materials. Of the different available non-destructive examination techniques, thermal non-destructive testing provides fast and remote inspection of the materials. Among various widely used thermal non-destructive testing techniques, frequency modulated thermal wave imaging gained its importance due to its higher test sensitivity and resolution. The adopted matched filter approach on the obtained temporal temperature distribution further concentrates supplied excitation energy into a narrow duration high peak power pulse. In this paper, the merits of the reconstructed high peak power pulsed data have been considered and emphasized in the context of independent component analysis. The obtained results clearly indicate that pulse compressed data improves defect detectability, reliability, memory usage, and computational complexity.