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Thanks to its good strength/mass ratio, a glass fibre reinforced plastic (GFRP) composite is a common material widely used in aviation, power production, automotive and other industries. In its turn, active infrared (IR) nondestructive testing (NDT) is a common inspection technique for detecting and characterizing structural defects in GFRP. Materials to be tested are typically subjected to optical heating which is supposed to occur on the material surface. However, GFRP composite is semitransparent for optical radiation of both visual and IR spectral bands. Correspondingly, the inspection process represents a certain combination of both optical and thermal phenomena. Therefore, the known characterization algorithms based on pure heat diffusion cannot be applied to semi-transparent materials. In this study, the phenomenon of GFRP semi-transparency has been investigated numerically and experimentally in application to thermal NDT. Both Xenon flash tubes and a laser have been used for thermal stimulation of opaque and semi-transparent test objects. It has been shown that the Penetration of optical heating radiation into composite reduces detectability of shallower defects, and the signal-to-noise ratio can be enhanced by applying the technique of thermographic signal reconstruction (TSR). In the inspection of the semi-transparent GFRP composite, the most efficient has been the laser heating followed by the TSR data processing. The perspectives of defect characterization of semi-transparent materials by using laser heating are discussed. A neural network has been used as a candidate tool for evaluating defect depth in composite materials, but its training should be performed in identical with testing conditions.
Pulse and flash thermography are experimental techniques which are widely used in the field of non-destructive testing for materials characterization and defect detection. We recently showed that it is possible to determine quantitatively the thickness of semitransparent polymeric solids by fitting of results of an analytical model to experimental flash thermography data, for both transmission and reflection configuration. However, depending on the chosen experimental configuration, different effective optical absorption coefficients had to be used in the model to properly fit the respective experimental data, although the material was always the same. Here, we show that this effect can be explained by the wavelength dependency of the absorption coefficient of the sample material if a polychromatic light source, such as a flash lamp, is used. We present an extension of the analytical model to describe the decay of the heating irradiance by two instead of only one effective absorption coefficient, greatly extending its applicability. We show that using this extended model, the experimental results from both measurement configurations and for different sample thicknesses can be fitted by a single set of parameters. Additionally, the deviations between experimental and modeled surface temperatures are reduced compared to a single optimized effective absorption coefficient.