Improvements in Scanning Infrared Thermography

Scanning infrared thermography systems have the potential to analyze materials and parts, quickly, accurately, and at a reduced cost compared to other systems. Scanning infrared thermography uses Fourier’s law of conductive heat transfer to detect both material and geometric anomalies in a particular sample. The current system has been developed to create an easy to operate physical system and an interface utilizing commercial software packages. New hardware components have been designed to work in concert with specially developed analytical models to treat surfaces with changing emissivity and uniformly finished surfaces like those used in traditional infrared scanning systems. The system has been successful at detecting defects on coated surfaces where cracks were oriented parallel to the heating element and at sub-optimal angles. In addition, new experimentation has shown the new camera shroud and LabView program to be successful at removing reflected radiation from variable emissivity, diffuse surfaces. However, the system has only been marginally successful at removing artifacts of reflected radiation from thermographic images of surfaces that show a high degree of specularity, making temperature correction and crack detection difficult. In these cases, coatings have shown to be a potential solution to eliminate specular effects and allow for continued use of the developed system.