Experimental Detection of Composite Delamination Damage based on UltrasonicInfrared Thermography

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