Visualising delamination in CFRP: a combination of infrared thermography with image translation technique

Delamination in carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) significantly degrades the performance of CFRP, and infrared thermography (IRT) is effective for detecting this type of internal defect. However, detection of some delaminations remains challenging due to either weak or absent indications in IRT results. This study proposed a novel approach to clearly visualise delamination by incorporating image translation technique into IRT. A strategy is constructed specifically for IRT to collect precisely aligned thermogram pairs, and a data augmentation method is developed considering both noise distribution in IRT results and delamination locations. Experiments on CFRP plates reveal that some delaminations, previously undetectable in raw IRT results, are distinctly visualised using the proposed method. Comparison analysis also demonstrates that the developed method exhibits superior performance compared to existing IRT methods. This study provides a new approach to effectively enhance the capability of IRT inspection technique, contributing to an accurate quality evaluation of CFRP material.