Automated transient thermography for the inspection of CFRP structures: experimental results and developed procedures

摘要

In thermography surveys, the inspector uses the camera to acquire images from the examined part. Common problems are the lack of repeatability when trying to repeat the scanning process, the need to carry the equipment during scanning, and long setting-up time. The aim of this paper is to present transient thermography results on CFRP plates for assessing different types of fabricated defects (impact damage, inclusions for delaminations, etc), as well as and to discuss and present a prototype robotic scanner to apply non destructive testing (thermographic scanning) on materials and structures. Currently, the scanning process is not automatic. The equipment to be developed, will be able to perform thermal NDT scanning on structures, create the appropriate scanning conditions (material thermal excitation), and ensure precision and tracking of scanning process. A thermographic camera that will be used for the image acquisition of the non destructive inspection, will be installed on a x, y, z, linear manipulator's end effector and would be surrounded by excitation sources (optical lamps), required for the application of transient thermography. In this work various CFRP samples of different shape, thickness and geometry were investigated using two different thermographic systems in order to compare and evaluate their effectiveness concerning the internal defect detectability under different testing conditions.