TIME-DEPENDENT TEMPERATURE DISTRIBUTIONS FOR NONDESTRUCTIVE PROBING OF MATERIAL PROPERTIES

The use of imposed temperature distributions in a specimen as a sensin g technique for evaluating material properties provides inspection met hods that are entirely nondestructive and noncontacting. These are imp ortant considerations as the field of nondestructive evaluation evolve s to include process monitoring during manufacture, where there is gre at incentive to remove bad parts before additional fabrication cost is incurred or to adjust the parameters of the process on-line. This art icle describes our efforts in the maturing field of time-resolved infr ared radiometry (TRIR). Our research has extended the TRIR technique t o include new excitation and detection methods and new concepts for em bedded sensors.