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The detection and characterization of surface breaking cracks in steel prior to damage is a technologically as well as economically important task especially for safety-relevant structures. Detection of small cracks already during the steel production process might significantly reduce the risk of failure and reduce production costs due to an obsolete post-processing.
However, the hostile environmental conditions (high temperature specimens) together with very strict requirements in current steel production (production speeds, in-line testing and evaluation) are challenging and render many well-established NDE techniques hardly applicable.
We present an approach to use laser thermographic testing as a fast, remote and contactless NDE method, that addresses these challenges and might ultimately allow for online crack detection.
The basic idea of laser thermographic testing, introduced by Kubiak in 1968, is the monitoring of the heat flow as induced by local heating. Disturbances within the heat flow generated by the presence of surface cracks can then be analyzed by image processing algorithms, as we have shown in previous work.
The aim of the presented work is to advance laser thermographic testing to be applicable to the specific conditions of steel production environments. This purpose was met by the development of a laboratory setup that allows us to simulate production conditions, as rolling speed, specimen temperature, laser heating power and study their influence on crack detection performance. This parametric study enabled us to develop and improve data processing and crack detection algorithms with the final goal of providing optimized in-line crack detection. The studies were accompanied by comprehensive FEM simulations to intensify the understanding of the contrast formation as well as the crucial parameters influencing the performance of the method.
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 ansatz, 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.
In this work, we describe the extension of the applicability of a point-shaped energy density detector formerly only applicable for flash lamp excitation to optical heat sources for step-heating thermography, such as IR lamps or halogen lamps. Such continuous heat sources are often used in active thermography testing, when materials with low thermal diffusivity and specimens with large heat capacity are examined and large amounts of energy have to be deposited. Here, the temperature transient at the sensor surface is recorded by the infrared camera that is already present. The energy (power) input into the investigated specimen can be determined during the following data evaluation by fitting the results of an analytical model to the experimental data.
Pulse and flash thermography are experimental techniques which are widely used in the field of non-destructive evaluation for materials characterization and defect detection. We recently showed that it is possible to quantitatively determine the thickness of semitransparent polymeric solids by fitting of results of an analytical model to experimental flash thermography data, for both transmission and reflection geometry. However, depending on the chosen experimental geometry, different effective optical absorption coefficients (i.e., penetration depths of the heating light) had to be utilized in the model in order to properly fit the experimental data. Here we show that this effect is caused by the wavelength dependency of the absorption coefficient of the sample material. We present an extension of the analytical model to incorporate this dispersion. Even accounting for only two different values of the absorption coefficient, the experimental results from both measurement geometries can be fitted by a single set of absorption coefficients. Additionally, the deviations between experimental data and fit are reduced compared to a single optimized effective absorption coefficient.
This work is part of the ZIM-project KF2201089AT4 and is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy due to an order of the German Bundestag.