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Active thermography has been developed into a well-established non-destructive testing method and is used to detect cracks, voids, or material properties. The spatial-temporal structure of the external heating: spatially: planar (e.g., halogen lamp) or local (e.g., focused laser), and temporally: pulsed (e.g., flash lamp) or periodical (e.g., halogen lamp), has led to different testing modalities, as for instance flash and lock-in thermography. In this work, we combine a high-power laser with a spatial light modulator (SLM) allowing us to merge all degrees of freedom into a spatially and temporally controlled heat source. This approach allows us to launch a set of individually controlled and fully coherent high-energy thermal waves into the sample volume. As one possible application, we demonstrate the interference of two phase shifted thermal wave patterns in order to detect the position and depth of hidden defects, which is still a challenging task in thermographic and photothermal techniques. The patterns are positioned with a certain distance and a phase shift of pi to each other, creating an amplitude depletion zone that is centered between them. Now, when a defect is brought into the depletion zone, the destructive interference is disturbed and the defect can be recognized. This approach means that we intentionally exploit the vertical and lateral propagation directions of the thermal waves. In a more general view, controlling simultaneously control of phase and amplitude of a set of thermal waves enables us to have a defined propagation of the thermal wave field within the sample, which means that thermal waves can be controlled almost like acoustical or optical waves. However, in contrast to optical or acoustical waves, thermal waves are highly damped due to the diffusive character of the thermal heat flow and therefore limited in penetration depth in relation to the achievable spatial resolution. Nevertheless, the coherence length of thermal waves can be chosen in the mm-range for modulation frequencies below 10 Hz which is perfectly met by present SLM technology. Eventually, this offers the opportunity to transfer known technologies from wave shaping techniques to thermography methods and to exploit the possibilities of coherent thermal wave shaping.
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 perpendicular 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
Structured illumination using high-power diode lasers generates a two-dimensional interference of thermal waves. In addition, the sources and the sample are moving relative to each other. Using different configurations, we investigate the validity of the temporal and spatial superposition principle of the heat diffusion equation for these cases both experimentally and by numerical-analytical modelling. Furthermore, we investigate the potential of this approach for non-destructive testing.