A miniaturised active thermography system for in-situ inspections

With the increase of the functionalisation, integration and complexity of industrial components and systems, deploying Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) devices for ‘in-situ’ inspection has become a major challenge for high-value assets. Due to the mismatching of size and volume between the existing inspection unit and the targeted complex object, inaccessibility and inapplicability have limited the applicability of NDT techniques. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a novel miniaturised active thermography system based on a commercial thermal imaging sensor featured with small size and low cost. Combining with different excitation sources, its detection performance on different types of defect of carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) is investigated and compared with an existing system. The results show that the proposed system can work with laser and flash effectively for degradation assessment although the detectability is compromised. Such a technique will play a unique role in the in-situ inspection where the space to deploy the device is limited.