Numerical method of active thermography for the reconstruction of back wall geometry

Abstract

The paper presents numerical methods to detect and classify defects and inhomogeneities by means of active thermography. The objective is to determine the wall thickness of structure elements with an inaccessible back wall, for example, of pipes or containers. As test specimens we used approximately 2 cm thick PVC samples with spatial variations in the back wall geometry. Flash lamps provided the heating. To know the thickness of the wall, we used two inversion methods and compared the results achieved. One is an iterative echo defect shape method and already tested on steel test specimens with good reconstruction results. The second one is the Levenberg-Marquardt method, applied here to thermographic data for non-destructive testing. Since data capturing using active thermography and the presented numerical methods can easily be automated, the combination of these two procedures is a promising approach providing a broad area of application.