Performance of the FAST system for stress analysis.

A state-of-the-art thermographic system has been developed based on a 512×512 focal-plane array thermal imager. The system was primarily designed to perform stress analysis, but has applications in other areas where small cyclic temperature variations are encountered. A detailed analysis of its performance relative to an existing equipment (SPATE) revealed that, at least for low frequency applications, the proposed system out performs SPATE by some two to three orders of magnitude such that high-resolution area scans can now be achieved in minutes instead of hours. It is suggested that higher frequency applications (i.e., order of 10 Hz) can be achieved with more up-to-date imagers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]