TY - CONF A1 - Thiel, Erik A1 - Kreutzbruck, M. A1 - Studemund, T. A1 - Ziegler, Mathias T1 - Thermal wave interference with high-power VCSEL arrays for locating vertically oriented subsurface defects T2 - AIP Conference Proceedings 1949 N2 - Among the photothermal methods, full-field thermal imaging is used to characterize materials, to determine thicknesses of layers, or to find inhomogeneities such as voids or cracks. The use of classical light sources such as flash lamps (impulse heating) or halogen lamps (modulated heating) led to a variety of nondestructive testing methods, in particular, lock-in and flash-thermography. In vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), laser light is emitted perpendicularly to the surface with a symmetrical beam profile. Due to the vertical structure, they can be arranged in large arrays of many thousands of individual lasers, which allows power scaling into the kilowatt range. Recently, a high-power yet very compact version of such a VCSEL-array became available that offers both the fast timing behavior of a laser as well as the large illumination area of a lamp. Moreover, it allows a spatial and temporal control of the heating because individual parts of the array can be controlled arbitrarily in frequency, amplitude, and phase. In conjunction with a fast infrared camera, such structured heating opens up a field of novel thermal imaging and testing methods. As a first demonstration of this approach, we chose a testing problem very challenging to conventional thermal infrared testing: The detection of very thin subsurface defects perpendicularly oriented to the surface of metallic samples. First, we generate destructively interfering thermal wave fields, which are then affected by the presence of defects within their reach. It turned out that this technique allows highly sensitive detection of subsurface defects down to depths in excess of the usual thermographic rule of thumb, with no need for a reference or surface preparation. T2 - 44TH ANNUAL REVIEW OF PROGRESS IN QUANTITATIVE NONDESTRUCTIVE EVALUATION CY - Provo, Utah DA - 16.07.2017 KW - Laser applications KW - Thermography KW - VCSEL KW - Subsurface defects PY - 2018 SN - 978-0-7354-1644-4 DO - https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5031547 SN - 0094-243X VL - 1949 SP - UNSP 060001, 1 EP - 8 AN - OPUS4-45171 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -