Hidden heterogeneous materials recognition in pulsed thermography

Pulsed thermography has been proven to effectively identify fluid ingress in aerospace honeycomb parts while inspecting large areas in a fast manner. Water, hydraulic oil and excess glue between skin and core may have similar appearance in the infrared image sequences, it is useful to detect what kind of ingress it is. In this study, a simple structure was used to simulate the fluid ingress in a honeycomb part, a 20mm thick steel slab was machined four 1.1mm depth and four 2mm depth circular flat-bottom holes with 20mm diameter at the same side. All holes were filled with different materials: water, oil, air and wax to simulate fluid ingress and excess glue. An algorithm was proposed to first find each hole based on fundamental imaging processing technologies, and then it is based on temporal thermal diffusive properties to automatically recognize what kind of fluid ingress it is in each hole. It was verified with the experimental results of different quantities of fluid ingress and several different flas...