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- Zeitschriftenartikel (34) (entfernen)
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- Thermography (18)
- Laser thermography (8)
- Active thermography (6)
- NDT (6)
- Non-destructive testing (6)
- Super resolution (5)
- Catastrophic optical damage (4)
- High-power diode lasers (4)
- Internal defects (4)
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- ja (1)
Im Projekt wurden systematische Untersuchungen zur thermografischen Erkennung von Oberflächenrissen mit Rissbreiten von ca. 0,1 bis 200 µm anhand von standardisierten bzw. selbst erstellten metallischen Referenzprobekörpern durchgeführt. Zur lokalen Anregung wurde ein Hochleistungs-Diodenlasersystem verwendet. Alle für die erfolgreiche Prüfung wesentlichen Parameter des Prüfsystems wurden systematisch untersucht und bewertet. Hieraus wurden Vorschläge, Empfehlungen und Faustformeln für die Wahl der Prüfparameter, Referenzprüfkörper, geeignete Gerätekomponenten und Auswertungsalgorithmen sowie Hinweise zur Prüfungsdurchführung abgeleitet. Zur Absicherung der Aussagen und zum Anschluss des neuen Prüfverfahrens an den Stand der Technik wurden Referenzprüfungen und -messungen mit etablierten Verfahren durchgeführt. Zudem wurde die Grenze der Nachweisempfindlichkeit des Verfahrens demonstriert.
Impulse and lock-in thermography have been applied to detect delaminations of prototype solder joints, similar to those to be produced between Cu shunts and Cu busbar stabilisers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Two infrared cameras with different detector materials and with different spectral ranges and two excitation techniques have been tested and compared for their ability to detect delaminations behind 2 and 3 mm thick Cu shunts. We have analyzed the signal to noise ratio (SNR) for each detected defect and are able to detect defects down to a nominal edge length of 4 mm behind 2 mm thick Cu shunts by using fast impulse thermography and a camera with a microbolometer array. For the 3 mm thick Cu shunt, on the other hand, the nominal 4 mm defect is only visible in the lock-in thermography phase images and the highest SNR has been achieved with a cooled InSb-based camera. In addition, numerical simulations show the influence of the minimum detectable defect size on the shunt thickness and that the developed on-site testing technique is sufficient to find all defects that are detectable theoretically.
Catastrophic optical damage (COD) is analyzed during single current pulse excitation of 975 nm emitting diode lasers. Power transients and thermal images are monitored during each pulse. The COD process is unambiguously related to the occurrence of a thermal flash of Plancks radiation. We observe COD to ignite multiple times in subsequent pulses. Thermography allows for tracing a spatial motion of the COD site on the front facet of the devices. The time constant of power decay after the onset of COD has values from 400 to 2000 ns, i.e., an order of magnitude longer than observed for shorter-wavelength devices.
Single-pulse tests of the catastrophic optical damage (COD) are performed for three batches of diode lasers with different gain-regions. The tests involve in situ inspection of front, rear, and side of the devices by a thermocamera. Devices with an Al-containing gain-region show COD at the front facet, as expected for strong facet heating via surface recombination and reabsorption of laser light. In contrast, Al-free devices with low surface recombination rates tend to fail at the rear facet, pointing to a different heating scenario. The high carrier density at the rear facet favors heating and COD via Auger recombination processes.
Double-side cooled high-power diode laser bars packaged by different techniques on different types of passive heat sinks are analyzed in terms of packaging-induced strain. Reference data from standard devices being single-side cooled only and packaged by conventional soft and hard soldering are also presented. Thermal profiling across the devices complements the results. The most suitable packaging architecture and technique for double-side cooled bars is identified. Measurements of the laser emission near field and electroluminescence pattern provide direct reference to the functionality of the devices. Furthermore, a type of cross calibration of the methods used for strain analysis is made, since all techniques are applied to the same set of bars. This involves micro photoluminescence, micro Raman, and degree-of-polarization electroluminescence spectroscopy.
This article presents deep unfolding neural networks to handle inverse problems in photothermal radiometry enabling super-resolution (SR) imaging. The photothermal SR approach is a well-known technique to overcome the spatial resolution limitation in photothermal imaging by extracting high-frequency spatial components based on the deconvolution with the thermal point spread function (PSF). However, stable deconvolution can only be achieved by using the sparse structure of defect patterns, which often requires tedious, handcrafted tuning of hyperparameters and results in computationally intensive algorithms. On this account, this article proposes Photothermal-SR-Net, which performs deconvolution by deep unfolding considering the underlying physics. Since defects appear sparsely in materials, our approach includes trained block-sparsity thresholding in each convolutional layer. This enables to super-resolve 2-D thermal images for nondestructive testing (NDT) with a substantially improved convergence rate compared to classic approaches. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on various deep unfolding and thresholding approaches. Furthermore, we explored how to increase the reconstruction quality and the computational performance. Thereby, it was found that the computing time for creating high-resolution images could be significantly reduced without decreasing the reconstruction quality by using pixel binning as a preprocessing step.
Detection of surface breaking cracks using flying line laser thermography: A Canny-based algorithm
(2021)
In this work, we introduce a new algorithm for effectual crack detection using flying line laser thermography, based on the well-known Canny approach. The algorithm transforms the input thermographic sequence into an edge map. Experimental measurements are performed on a metallic component that contains surface breaking cracks due to industrial use. The specimen is tested using flying line thermography at different scanning speeds and laser input powers. Results obtained with the proposed algorithm are additionally compared with a previously established algorithm for flying spot thermography. The proposed Canny-based algorithm can be used in automated systems for thermographic non-destructive testing.
We combine three different approaches to greatly enhance the defect reconstruction ability of active thermographic testing. As experimental approach, laser-based structured illumination is performed in a step-wise manner. As an intermediate signal processing step, the virtual wave concept is used in order to effectively convert the notoriously difficult to solve diffusion-based inverse problem into a somewhat milder wavebased inverse problem. As a final step, a compressed-sensing based optimization procedure is applied which efficiently solves the inverse problem by making advantage of the joint sparsity of multiple blind measurements. To evaluate our proposed processing technique, we investigate an additively manufactured stainless steel sample with eight internal defects. The concerted super resolution approach is compared to conventional thermographic reconstruction techniques and shows an at least four times better spatial resolution.
Learned block iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm for photothermal super resolution imaging
(2022)
Block-sparse regularization is already well known in active thermal imaging and is used for multiple-measurement-based inverse problems. The main bottleneck of this method is the choice of regularization parameters which differs for each experiment. We show the benefits of using a learned block iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (LBISTA) that is able to learn the choice of regularization parameters, without the need to manually select them. In addition, LBISTA enables the determination of a suitable weight matrix to solve the underlying inverse problem. Therefore, in this paper we present LBISTA and compare it with state-of-the-art block iterative shrinkage thresholding using synthetically generated and experimental test data from active thermography for defect reconstruction. Our results show that the use of the learned block-sparse optimization approach provides smaller normalized mean square errors for a small fixed number of iterations. Thus, this allows us to improve the convergence speed and only needs a few iterations to generate accurate defect reconstruction in photothermal super-resolution imaging.
The coherent superposition of two anti-phased thermal wave fields creates a zone of destructive interference which is extremely sensitive to the presence of defects without any reference measurements.
Combining a high power laser with a spatial light modulator allows modulating phase and amplitude of an illuminated surface that induces spatially and temporally controlled thermal wave fields. The position and depth of defects are reconstructed from analysis of the Amplitude and Phase of the resulting photothermal signal. The proposed concept is experimentally validated and supported by numerical modeling.
The spontaneous emission of a GaAs-based tapered laser diode emitting at λ = 1060 nm was measured through a window in the transparent substrate in order to study the carrier density distribution inside the device. It is shown that the tapered geometry is responsible for nonuniform amplification of the spontaneous/stimulated emission which in turn influences the spatial distribution of the carriers starting from below threshold. The carrier density does not clamp at the lasing threshold and above it the device shows lateral spatial hole-burning caused by high stimulated emission along the cavity center.
Mechanisms and fast kinetics of the catastrophic optical damage (COD) in GaAs-based diode lasers
(2011)
COD diagram determined for a batch of broad-area AlGaAs diode lasers. The time to COD within a single current pulse is plotted versus the actual average optical power in the moment when the COD takes place. Full circles stand for clearly identified COD events (right ordinate), whereas open circles (left ordinate) represent the pulse duration in experiments, where no COD has been detected. A borderline (gray) exists between two regions, i. e., parameter sets, of presence (orange) and absence of COD (blue). This borderline is somewhat blurred because of the randomness in filamentation of the laser nearfield and scatter in properties of the involved individual devices.
The early stages of catastrophic optical damage (COD) in 808 nm emitting diode lasers are mapped by simultaneously monitoring the optical emission with a 1 ns time resolution and deriving the device temperature from thermal images. COD occurs in highly localized damage regions on a 30 to 400 ns time scale which is determined by the accumulation of excess energy absorbed from the optical output. We identify regimes in which COD is avoided by the proper choice of operation parameters.
We present an all-purpose crack detection algorithm for flying spot thermography which is directly applicable to a thermogram sequence without the need of any additional information about the experimental setup. A single image containing distinct crack signatures is derived in two steps. Firstly, the spatial derivative is calculated for each frame of the sequence and, secondly, the resulting data set is sorted pixel wise along the time axis. The feasibility of the proposed procedure is proven by testing a piece of rail that comprises roll contact fatigue cracks and by comparing the results with magnetic particle testing.
Widerstandspunktschweißen ist insbesondere im Automobilbau eine der wichtigsten Fügetechniken. Bislang erfolgt die Qualitätssicherung überwiegend durch stichprobenartige zerstörende Prüfung. Eine zerstörungsfreie Prüftechnik würde neben der Reduzierung der Prüfkosten auch eine Optimierung des Punktschweißverfahrens bedeuten, da prinzipiell jeder Schweißpunkt geprüft werden könnte und somit auch eine Reduzierung der Anzahl der Schweißpunkte möglich ist.
Es wird ein Verfahren vorgestellt, bei dem die Punktschweißverbindung zwischen zwei Stahlblechen optisch auf einer Blechseite mittels Laser oder Blitzlicht erwärmt wird. Die aufgeschmolzene Zone, die sogenannte Schweißlinse, stellt dabei neben der mechanischen Verbindung auch eine Wärmebrücke zwischen den beiden verschweißten Blechen dar, die bei diesem Verfahren ausgenutzt wird. Durch den verbesserten thermischen Kontakt zwischen den verschweißten Blechen an der Schweißlinse kontrastiert diese deutlich mit dem umgebenden Blechmaterial, bei dem der Wärmeübertrag zwischen den Blechen vergleichsweise gering ist. Dieser Kontrast im thermischen Verhalten kann mittels zeitabhängiger Thermografie gemessen werden.
Durch das hier vorgestellte Verfahren kann mittels aktiver Thermografie sowohl in Transmissions- als auch in Reflexionsanordnung die Größe des thermischen Kontaktes zwischen den beiden Blechen ermittelt werden, welche ein Maß für die Größe der Schweißlinse und damit für die qualitative Güte der Schweißung darstellt. Ein Vorteil des entwickelten Verfahrens ist seine Anwendbarkeit auf Bleche ohne Oberflächenbehandlung.
Wärmebehandlung und zerstörungsfreie Prüfung: Oberflächenrisse mit der Laser-Thermografie finden
(2015)
Die Thermografie als zerstörungsfreies Prüfverfahren erlaubt das Erkennen einer Vielzahl von Defekten in unterschiedlichsten Werkstoffen. Hierzu ist zum einen eine Energiequelle erforderlich, welche einen Wärmestrom im Werkstück erzeugt, und zum anderen eine Infrarot-Kamera, welche den orts- und zeitabhängigen Temperaturverlauf der Werkstückoberfläche analysiert. Neue Ansätze unter Verwendung von Lasern ermöglichen nun auch die Prüfung auf winzige Oberflächenrisse. Die aktuelle Grenze der Nachweisempfindlichkeit für mittels klassischer Thermografie nur schwer prüfbare hochreflektierende Metalloberflächen liegt mit Rissbreiten und -tiefen bis hinunter in den Sub-Mikrometerbereich und damit im Bereich der fluoreszierenden Magnetpulver- und Eindringprüfung. Dabei sind jedoch weder Verbrauchsmittel, noch eine Oberflächenpräparation notwendig und eine Prüfung kann berührungslos und automatisiert über Entfernungen bis in den Meter-Bereich erfolgen. Bei der Wärmebehandlung und insbesondere beim Randschichthärten mittels Laserstrahlung stehen ebenfalls hochleistungsfähige Energiequellen zur Erzeugung intensiver dynamischer Temperaturgradienten zur Verfügung. Damit eröffnet sich unmittelbar die Möglichkeit der Integration der thermografischen Prüfung in die Fertigung. Der Beitrag stellt die neuesten Entwicklungen der vielversprechenden Laser-Thermografie-Technik vor und zeigt, warum deren Einsatz potentiell die Standardprüfverfahren Magnetpulver- bzw. Eindringprüfung für eine Reihe von Prüfproblemen beerben könnte.
The detection and characterization of surface cracks in steel specimens prior to damage is a technologically and economically highly significant task and is of utmost importance when it comes to safety-relevant structures. In steel production where steel billets at high temperatures have to be inspected while moving a number of well-established NDT methods cannot be applied. Laser thermography however is a promising candidate to serve as a fast, non-contact and remote tool in this case. We present a study that shows that the crack detection capabilities of laser thermography can be extended also to specimens at high temperature. A combination of inductive and laser heating allows to systematically study the contrast formation as well as the optimization of the important measurement parameters. The experiments are accompanied by FEM simulations that provide a better insight of the physical correlations and support the experimental developments. The aim of these studies is to develop a system with high inspection speed and detection performance to be in-line operated under the hostile environment of steel production lines.
In the field of optically excited thermography, flash lamps (impulse shaped planar heating) and halogen lamps (modulated planar heating) have become established for the specific regimes of impulse and lock-in thermography. Flying-spot laser thermography is implemented by means of a rasterized focused laser, e. g. for crack detection (continuous wave operation) and photothermal material characterization (high-frequency modulated). The availability of novel technologies, i. e. fast and high-resolution IR cameras, brilliant innovative light sources and high-performance data acquisition and processing technology will enable a paradigm shift from stand-alone photothermal and thermographic techniques to uniform quantitative measurement and testing technology that is faster and more precise. Similar to an LED array, but with irradiance two orders of magnitude higher, a new type of brilliant laser source, i. e. the VCSEL array (vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser), is now available. This novel optical energy source eliminates the strong limitation to the temporal dynamics of established light sources and at the same time is spectrally clearly separated from the detection wavelength. It combines the fast temporal behavior of a diode laser with the high optical irradiance and the wide illumination area of flash lamps. In addition, heating can also be carried out in a structured manner, because individual areas of the VCSEL array can be controlled independently of each other. This new degree of freedom enables the development of completely new thermographic NDT methods.
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.
In this paper we propose super resolution measurement and post-processing strategies that can be applied in thermography using laser line scanning. The implementation of these techniques facilitates the separation of two closely spaced defects and avoids the expected deterioration of spatial resolution due to heat diffusion. The experimental studies were performed using a high-power laser as heat source in combination with pulsed thermography measurements (step scanning) or with continuous heating measurements (continuous scanning). Our work shows that laser line step scanning as well as continuous scanning both can be used within our developed super resolution (SR) techniques. Our SR techniques make use of a compressed sensing based algorithm in post- processing, the so-called iterative joint sparsity (IJOSP) approach. The IJOSP method benefits from both - the sparse nature of defects in space as well as from the similarity of each measurement. In addition, we show further methods to improve the reconstruction quality e.g. by simple manipulations in thermal image processing such as by considering the effect of the scanning motion or by using different optimization algorithms within the IJOSP approach. These super resolution image processing methods are discussed so that the advantages and disadvantages of each method can be extracted. Our contribution thus provides new approaches for the implementation of super resolution techniques in laser line scanning thermography and informs about which experimental and post-processing parameters should be chosen to better separate two closely spaced defects.