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Ultrasonic infrared thermography is a rapid and informative method of nondestructive testing, used to inspect materials and products in aviation and rocket and space industries. High-power piezoelectric emitters stimulate various materials by ultrasound and help revealing hidden flaws by local temperature changes, which can amount to tens of degrees. The possibility of optimizing the procedure of ultrasonic infrared thermography by choosing the frequency of acoustic waves so as to match the frequencies of local resonances of defects of different sizes has been investigated.

Solid rocket motors (SRMs) have been widely applied in missiles, space rockets and shuttles. However, because of some technological and environmental reasons, debonding or poor bonding usually appears in the insulator of SRMs. To evaluate the bonding state between the insulator and the shell during manufacturing, a phase sensitive modulated thermography (MT) is proposed. In order to optimize the operating condition, the influences of the modulation frequency, insulator thickness and debonding lateral size on defect signals are studied through experimentation and 3D numerical simulation. Finite element analysis (FEA) using ANSYS software is applied to simulate the thermal process of the structures precisely. The results show that phase sensitive MT is an effective approach to detect the debondings in the adhesion interfaces. The phase difference at the modulation frequency can be expressed as a quintic polynomial of the modulation frequency in the usual operating frequency range, and the best modulation frequency and detectable frequency band can be determined by the polynomial; when the insulator thickness increases, the best modulation frequency and the maximum phase difference decrease; when the debonding lateral size increases, the maximum phase difference increases while the best modulation frequency remains unchanged. The results provide a guideline for the MT of debondings in SRMs.

Pulsed thermography has been widely used in the inspection of composite materials. The detection limit of pulsed thermography of the materials is often a question being concerned by end users. However, the detection limit cannot be described only by a simple parameter, and is affected by many factors associated with the defect, material, excitation, infrared camera and data processing algorithm. The current concept of detection limit defined with the minimum detectable size, the maximum detectable depth or the minimum aspect ratio depends on the specific experimental conditions, and it lacks universality when the extrinsic experimental conditions change. The aim of this paper is to establish a unified standard model of the detection limit which can be applied to various experimental conditions. The solution was to decouple the material’s intrinsic thermal property and extrinsic experimental condition dependencies and then allow them to be described independently. A new expression of the detection limit of the PT was firstly proposed by creating a differential temperature contour map. Taking delaminations in a C/SiC composite as detecting defects, an experiment was conducted to assess the feasibility and the detection limit, and to evaluate the noise level in practice. The influences of defect size and defect depth on the defect informative parameters were analyzed by using the finite element method based on 2D modeling. Eventually, the differential temperature contour map was calculated for the pulsed thermography of delaminations of C/SiC composites. The results show that the differential temperature contour map proposed can strictly describe the detection limit due to its differential temperature invariance property, and it provides a comprehensive tool to consider many experimental parameters including thermal excitation energy intensity, noise level, and SNR threshold by using a criterion equation in practice.