Solving inverse geometry heat conduction problems by postprocessing steady thermograms

This paper deals with the use of steady active thermographic inspection as a structural health monitoring method to detect defects and inclusions in a heat conductive medium. The proposed postprocessing method has the advantage of taking into account the whole physics of the problem instead of a reduced set of physical information, as most of the traditional methods do. In comparison with other nondestructive testing techniques like ultrasonics, thermographic inspection is non-contact, more non intrusive, and safer. However, processing thermographic data is a fairly demanding problem because heat conduction is short range and exhibits a poor signal-to-noise ratio. Numerical experiments illustrate that the present postprocessing technique detects damage fairly well even in very challenging scenarios where the size of the defects is rather small and/or thermograms are highly noisy. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.