Delamination defects detection for wind turbine blades based on pulsed infrared thermography

Carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) is extensively used in wind turbine blades (WTBs) due to its high specific strength, rigidity, and lightweight characteristics. However, CFRP is prone to defects such as delamination during production and service, which severely affect the operational safety and power generation efficiency of wind turbines. This study proposes a pulsed infrared thermography (PIRT) system integrated with a hybrid domain denoising algorithm for detecting delamination defects in WTBs. By combining frequency-domain Fourier transform (FT) denoising, time-domain thermal signal reconstruction (TSR) as a hybrid domain denoising (HDD) algorithm, and subsequent pulsed phase thermography (PPT), the method addresses limitations of conventional single-domain approaches. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the HDD-PPT algorithm achieves superior signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to standalone FT or TSR methods, validated through one-way ANOVA (p < 0.05).