Automation and Evaluation of Flash-Thermographic Inspections

This thesis addresses the design, construction and software implementation of an active flash thermographic test rig. Thermography belongs to the class of non-destructive material testing methods. The aim of this work is to implement a flexible test rig which simplifies flash thermographic tests on specific test objectives. This includes the acquisition of a time-series of images during a flash-thermographic process, as well as the analysis of the data image using predefined evaluation methods. To this end a series of standard thermographic computational procedures are implemented and where required extended. The results of these computations are compared for different reference specimens. Furthermore, functions have been developed which enable the software to automatically detect defects in a specimen in qualitative and quantitative manner. The software therefore applies different image processing techniques on the results of the evaluation methods. This shall be seen as preparation for an automatic and autonomous operation in industrial applications.