| A novel "Flying Spot" infrared camera for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and nondestructive characterization is presented. The camera scans the focal point of an unmodulated heating laser beam across the sample in a raster. The detector of the camera tracks the heating spot in the same raster, but with a time delay. The detector is thus looking at the "thermal wake" of the heating spot. The time delay between heating and detection is determined by the speed of the laser spot and the distance between it and the detector image. Since this time delay can be made arbitrarily small, the camera is capable of making thermal wave images of phenomena which occur on a very short time scale. In addition, because the heat source is a very small spot, the heat flow is fully three-dimensional. This makes the camera system sensitive to features, like tightly closed vertical cracks, which are invisible to imaging systems which employ full-field heating. A detailed theory which relates the temperature profile around the heating spot to the sample thermal properties is also described. The camera represents a potentially useful tool for measuring thermal diffusivities of materials by means of fitting the recorded temperature profiles to the theoretical curves with the diffusivity as a fitting parameter. |
