Research on thermal wave processing of lock-in thermography based on analyzing image sequences for NDT

Lock-in thermography, an active IR thermography technique for NDT, is based on propagation and reflection of thermal waves which are launched from the surface into the inspected component by absorption of modulated radiation. In this paper, thermal wave image sequences were sampled by a Cedip JADE MWIR 550 FPA infrared camera. Thermal wave signal processing algorithms are investigated to obtain information on subsurface defects. The Fourier transform, four-point correlation, and digital lock-in correlation algorithms are applied to extract the amplitude and phase of thermal wave’s harmonic component. A novel method called the time constant method (TCM) is proposed to analyze subsurface defects by using lock-in thermography. The experimental results confirm the thermal wave signal processing algorithms’ efficiency on subsurface defect detection.