LAUSR

Inspection reliability of sub-surface defects is imperative for safer functionality of critical components/materials/structures used in a wide variety of applications in various industries. The need for reliable, fast, remote, safe inspection and evaluation methods for detection of hidden defects increases in parallel with the demand for more sustainable solutions which helps in inherent modifications in design and manufacturing specifications. During in-service operation, the hidden defects are typically originated from various loading conditions leading to catastrophic failure. This perspective explores the best possible reliable, fast, remote, safe, and easy to implement for field inspection and evaluation experimental method and the associated post-processing approach using InfraRed Imaging (IRI) for Thermal Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation (TNDT&E) of Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) materials having delamination defects. This perspective further explores the state-of-the-art infrared imaging modalities used in TNDT&E by highlighting their advantages and limitations in terms of the detection sensitivity and depth resolvability to detect the subsurface defects located at interior of material. Most of the proposed experimental and post-processing techniques presented in the literature for TNDT&E, explore the observed spatial thermal contrast over the defective region of sample to provide the depth resolvability from the reconstructed thermograms even though it is obtained from the temporal data processing on the captured image sequence. This perspective provides an insight on the state-of-the-art research in the field of thermal/infrared non-destructive testing and evaluation and associated post-processing approaches to visualize the hidden subsurface defects not only resolved by spatial thermal gradients but also simultaneously provide temporal thermal gradients to locate defective regions.