Active thermography is a nowadays widely used NDT method making use of thermal material properties for defect detection. Basically, the sample is heated and the resulting surface temperature is recorded by an IR camera. For laser thermography a laser is used to heat the sample locally. The resulting spherical heat flow allows the detection of voids in arbitrary orientation. In this work, a method is presented which is suitable for the quantitative characterization of depth and angle of surface cracks. The main idea is to evaluate the crack-caused asymmetries of the laser's thermal footprint. The heat is introduced at fixed reference positions relative to the crack. In this paper a data analysis procedure is presented which allows the crack depth and angle to be described by only two characteristic scalar parameters. By investigating artificial test specimens with spark eroded notches, the feasibility of this method is validated. Furthermore, the behavior of the characteristic parameters with variations of crack angle, depth and experimental conditions is studied systematically by FEM simulations, showing that these parameters are well behaved.
In this article, we present a measurement procedure to gain information about depth and angle of surface braking cracks. The method is based on a local excitation with, e.g., a laser. The resulting surface temperature is recorded with an infrared camera. Based on this data, crack-caused anisotropies in the lateral heat flow can be detected and exploited to characterise the cracks. The experimental set-up is based on a Nd:YAG laser for heating and a high-speed infrared camera (InSb FPA, 3 to 5 µm) providing a frame rate of up to 500 Hz. Up to now, only qualitative information was gained from measurements of this type, whereas the local transient behaviour of temperature distribution provides also quantitative information of the crack parameters. Using FEM simulation we can show herein that it is possible to simultaneously resolve the angle and depth and, in particular, the depth of non-perpendicular cracks.