TY - CONF A1 - Jonietz, Florian A1 - Myrach, Philipp A1 - Rethmeier, Michael A1 - Suwala, H. A1 - Ziegler, Mathias T1 - Laser Based Spot Weld Characterization N2 - Spot welding is one of the most important joining technologies, especially in the automotive industry. Hitherto,the quality of spot welded joints is tested mainly by random destructive tests. A nondestructive testing technique offers the benefit of cost reduction of the testing procedure and optimization of the fabrication process, because every joint could be examined. This would lead to a reduced number of spot welded joints, as redundancies could be avoided. In the procedure described here, the spot welded joint between two zinc-coated steel sheets (HX340LAD+Z100MB or HC340LA+ZE 50/50) is heated optically on one side. Laser radiation and flash light are used as heat sources. The melted zone, the so called “weld nugget” provides the mechanical stability of the connection, but also constitutes a thermal bridge between the sheets. Due to the better thermal contact, the spot welded joint reveals a thermal behavior different from the surrounding material, where the heat transfer between the two sheets is much lower. The difference in the transient thermal behavior is measured with time resolved thermography. Hence, the size of the thermal contact between the two sheets is determined, which is directly correlated to the size of the weld nugget, indicating the quality of the spot weld. The method performs well in transmission with laser radiation and flash light. With laser radiation, it works even in reflection geometry, thus offering the possibility of testing with just one-sided accessibility. By using heating with collimated laser radiation, not only contactfree, but also remote testing is feasible. A further convenience compared to similar thermographic approaches is the applicability on bare steel sheets without any optical coating for emissivity correction. For this purpose, a proper way of emissivity correction was established. T2 - 42ND ANNUAL REVIEW OF PROGRESS IN QUANTITATIVE NONDESTRUCTIVE EVALUATION: Incorporating the 6th European-American Workshop on Reliability of NDE CY - Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA DA - 26.07.2015 KW - Laser PY - 2016 SN - 978-0-7354-1353-5 DO - https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4940570 VL - 1706 SP - 100010-1 EP - 100010-8 PB - AIP Publishing AN - OPUS4-35367 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Burgholzer, P. A1 - Berer, T. A1 - Ziegler, Mathias A1 - Thiel, Erik A1 - Ahmadi, Samim A1 - Gruber, J. A1 - Mayr, G. A1 - Hendorfer, G. T1 - Blind structured illumination as excitation for super-resolution photothermal radiometry N2 - Photothermal radiometry with an infrared camera allows the contactless temperature measurement of multiple surface pixels simultaneously. A short light pulse heats the sample. The heat propagates through the sample by diffusion and the corresponding temperature evolution is measured at the sample’s surface by an infrared camera. The main drawback in radiometric imaging is the loss of the spatial resolution with increasing depth due to heat diffusion, which results in blurred images for deeper lying structures. We circumvent this information loss due to the diffusion process by using blind structured illumination, combined with a non-linear joint sparsity reconstruction algorithm. The structured illumination is realized by parallel laser lines from a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) array controlled by a random binary pattern generator. By using 150 different patterns of structured illumination and our iterative joint sparsity algorithm, it was possible to resolve 1 mm thick lines at a distance down to 0.5 mm, which results in a resolution enhancement of approximately a factor of four compared to the resolution of 5.9 mm for homogenous illuminated thermographic reconstruction. KW - Super-resolution imaging KW - Thermography KW - Blind structured illumination KW - VCSEL array PY - 2019 DO - https://doi.org/10.1080/17686733.2019.1655247 SN - 1768-6733 VL - 17 IS - 4 SP - 268 EP - 278 PB - Taylor & Francis Group CY - Milton, UK AN - OPUS4-49122 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Thiel, Erik A1 - Ziegler, Mathias A1 - Studemund, Taarna T1 - Localization of subsurface defects in uncoated aluminum with structured heating using high-power VCSEL laser arrays N2 - We report on photothermal detection of subsurface defects by coherent superposition of thermal wave fields. This is made possible by structured heating using high-power VCSEL laser arrays whose individual emitter groups can be arbitrarily controlled. In order to locate the defects, we have developed a scanning method based on the continuous wavelet transformation with complex Morlet wavelet using the destructive interference effect of thermal waves. This approach can also be used for thermally very fast and highly reflective materials such as uncoated aluminum. We show that subsurface defects at an aspect ratio of defect width to defect depth down to 1/3 are still detectable in this material. KW - Thermography KW - Heat diffusion KW - Laser thermography KW - Structured heating KW - NDT KW - Subsurface defects KW - Thermal wave KW - VCSEL KW - Wavelet transformation PY - 2019 DO - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10765-018-2478-9 SN - 1572-9567 SN - 0195-928X VL - 40 IS - 2 SP - 17, 1 EP - 13 PB - Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 AN - OPUS4-47208 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Puthiyaveettil, N. A1 - Thomas K, R. A1 - Unnikrishnakurup, S. A1 - Myrach, Philipp A1 - Ziegler, Mathias A1 - Balasubramaniam, K. T1 - Laser line scanning thermography for surface breaking crack detection modeling and experimental study N2 - Crack detection in metallic samples at high surface temperature, hostile and hazardous environments, etc. is challenging situation in any manufacturing industries. Most of the present NDE methods are suitable only for lower surface temperatures, especially room temperature. In this situation, we need a fast and non-contact NDT method which can be applied even in high sample surface temperature. Laser thermography is one of the techniques having a high potential in non-contact inspection. As a preliminary investigation, in this article, we have studied the potentiality of laser line thermography in crack detection at room temperature. In laser line thermography, a continuous wave (CW) laser is used to generate a laser line, which in turn is used to scan the metal surface. The heat distribution over the sample surface is recorded by an infrared thermal (IR) camera. Two different approaches are reported in this work. Firstly, a stationary laser line source and its interaction with cracks; secondly, moving laser line source scanning over a surface with crack. When the distance between crack centre to laser line centre increases, crack detectability will decrease; and when laser power increases, crack detectability will increase. A dedicated image processing algorithm was developed to improve the detectability of the cracks. To understand the heat transfer phenomenon, a simplified 3D model for laser thermography was developed for the heat distribution during laser heating and was validated with experimental results. Defects were incorporated as a thermally thin resistive layer (TTRL) in numerical modeling, and the effect of TTRL in heat conduction is compared with experimental results. KW - Thermography KW - Laser Thermography KW - Cracks KW - FEM KW - NDT PY - 2019 DO - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infrared.2019.103141 VL - 104 SP - 103141 PB - Elsevier B.V. AN - OPUS4-49941 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Sobczak, M. A1 - Lecompagnon, Julien A1 - Hirsch, Philipp Daniel A1 - Pieczonka, Ł. A1 - Ziegler, Mathias T1 - Impact damage characterization on CFRP parts using laser line scanning active thermography N2 - This study presents a dual-path data processing framework for the detection and characterization of barely visible impact damage (BVID) in carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) structures using laser line thermography (LLT). A robotic LLT system was used to scan impacted CFRP specimens, and the resulting thermal sequences were analyzed using two complementary methods: full thermogram reconstruction followed by Pulse Phase Thermography (PPT) to detect subsurface delaminations, and Time-Summed Gradient Filtering (TSGF) to enhance surface-breaking cracks. Both processing paths produced interpretable results that were fused into a unified combined image and overlay mask, enabling simultaneous visualization of different defect types from a single scan. Quantitative analysis was performed on the binary masks to extract defect dimensions and Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values. The results demonstrated that delaminations and multiple cracks could be accurately detected and spatially distinguished, with good agreement to reference methods such as flash thermography and vibrothermography. This work highlights the potential of LLT as a versatile and scalable inspection technique, where multimodal defect detection and segmentation can be achieved through targeted processing and data fusion strategies. KW - Active thermography KW - CFRP KW - Laser line scanning KW - Delamination KW - Cracks KW - BVID KW - NDT PY - 2026 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-654097 DO - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compositesb.2026.113425 SN - 1359-8368 VL - 313 SP - 1 EP - 9 PB - Elsevier Ltd. AN - OPUS4-65409 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -