Characterization Method of Surface Crack Based on Laser Thermography

Abstract

The characterization of micro cracks on metal surface plays an important role in the process of manufacturing and using, which has attracted a lot of attention. This is mainly due to the fact that the size of defects is smaller and the depth of defects is difficult to predict compared with metal materials with larger plane, which is still challenging. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a characterization method of surface defects based on reflective laser thermography, and designs a laser heating nondestructive testing system based on reflection. The system includes a semiconductor laser to heat the surface of metal cracks, and an infrared imager to record changes in the temperature field of the metal surface. In the process of data analysis, an Otsu adaptive threshold segmentation method is selected to quantify the defect size, which can control the quantification accuracy of defect size within 25%. A derivative analysis method is proposed to quantify the depth of defects, which can control the depth quantification accuracy of tiny defects within 7%.

Keywords

• Characterization
• micro cracks
• laser thermography
• nondestructive testing