Coded thermal wave imaging technique for infrared non-destructive testing and evaluation

Active InfraRed Thermography (IRT) is one of the promising Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) and evaluation method for inspection of various solid materials. Its inherent inspection capabilities such as remote, wide area monitoring, fast, quantitative and safe deployment in field test makes active IRT as a vital testing technique in NDT community. The present work introduces a novel application based on recently proposed Golay Coded Thermal Wave Imaging (GCTWI) to examine mild steel and carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) test samples having sub-surface defects. Further defect detection capability of the proposed approach is compared with the conventional frequency domain phase approach on each sequence by considering the signal-to-noise ratio as a figure of merit.