Laser photothermal radiometric instrument for industrial steel hardness inspection

To meet the industrial demand for on-line steel hardness inspection and quality control, a non-contact, non-destructive laser photothermal radiometric instrument (HD-PTR) was developed. The instrument is equipped with a non-liquid-nitrogen-cooled HgCdZnTe (MCZT) detector, a National Instruments data acquisition card with a Dynamic System Analysis (DSA) module, and control software. A series of industrial steel samples which included automotive screws and aircraft gears (flat or curvilinear) were examined. The effective hardness case depths of these samples ranged from 0.21 mm to 1.78 mm. The results demonstrated that three measurement parameters (metrics) can be extracted when using a fast swept-sine photothermal method. These parameters include the phase minimum (or peak) frequency, f(min), the half width, W, and the area, S. It was found that they are complementary for evaluating widely different ranges of hardness case depths. f(min) is most suitable for large case depths, and Wand S for shallower case depths.