Nondestructive testing of objects of complex shape using infrared thermography: Determination of the spatiotemporal distribution of the irradiation heat flux

The existing inverse methods used to determine the heat flux density require that the forward problem and the problem domain (geometry) be known. In this paper, in order to determine the spatiotemporal heat flux density without knowing the real problem domain, we propose an approach based on temporal tracking of the thermal front. The proposed approach is particularly relevant when a three-dimensional formulation is adopted for nondestructive testing using infrared thermography. For such a formulation, heat flux density resulting from the external thermal stimulus is needed and must be determined to accurately characterize the defects and reconstruct the internal geometry of the inspected objects. The proposed approach uses only two inputs: the time-dependent temperature of the frontal surface recorded by an infrared camera and the 3D point cloud of the frontal surface collected by a 3D scanner. The method is evaluated numerically on an object of complex shape. We consider the case of pulsed thermal stimulus as well as the cases of unit step and modulated thermal stimuli. An experimental validation is performed on a cylindrical object submitted to a pulsed thermal stimulus and a modulated thermal stimulus. The results show the accuracy of the method which can easily be implemented as the initial step of the three-dimensional quantitative nondestructive testing of objects using infrared thermography.