Eddy Current Stimulated Thermography and its Applications

Eddy current stimulated thermography is one of the advanced nondestructive testing (NDT) methods, which integrates eddy current and thermography together to take advantages of two typical NDT techniques. The theoretical basis of eddy current stimulated thermography was discussed first. After that, the experiment system was introduced in detail, including the system structure, coil design and selection of test parameters. Experiment and simulation results were presented. The infra-red (IR) images obtained by experiment and the temperature distribution images captured with simulation study were analyzed using feature extraction. The features of the IR images and the simulation images show that eddy current stimulated thermography could be applied to identify and diagnose damage of metal component. The probability of application of eddy current stimulated thermography was discussed as well.