Experimental Detection of Composite Delamination Damage based on Ultrasonic Infrared Thermography

An experimental setup is designed to detect composite delamination damage based on ultrasonic infrared thermography. The ultrasonic infrared thermography system is composed by ultrasonic excitation system, infrared thermal imager and data acquisition system and two damaged composite plate specimens are produced in the experiment. The image processing methods including thresholding, filters, edge detection and morphological processing method are combined to analyze infrared thermal images and accurately identify the location and size of the delamination damage. The temperature changes of defective composites under different preload of ultrasonic excitation are analyzed. The experiments demonstrate that the ultrasonic detection has the effect of the selection of heating in the defective area of the composite. The experimental results come to the conclusion that the ultrasonic infrared thermography is an effective quantitative method to detect the composite delamination damage.