A semi-automatic thermographic procedure for the assessment of the welded area of resistance projection welded joints has been developed. Currently, to assess the quality of RPW joints destructive tests are used and the more commonly used non-destructive technique is the ultrasonic one. The possibility for a quantitative evaluation of the welded area by thermographic technique has been proved by means of an innovative procedure applied on steel RPW joints with ‘as it’ surface conditions. Measurements obtained by thermography and ultrasound have been compared, to verify the developed procedure.
Up to now, the inspection of wind turbines with industrial climbers has been considered ”state of the art”. However, ever-larger wind turbines and advancing digitization make modern and automated inspection methods indispensable. Passive thermography can serve as such a digital and atomized method while it is well known for its applications in the inspection of buildings or electrical circuits. However, its application relies on thermal gradients in the inspected object such that a temperature contrast exists between damaged and sound areas. This also holds for unheated structures like rotor blades of wind turbines which show no intrinsic temperature gradient and can hardly be heated. Under certain weather conditions with sufficient solar loading and diurnal temperature variations, passive thermography is suitable for the in-service inspection of rotor blades. However, for a reliable use of passive thermography on ”thermal passive” components, the incorporation of these environmental conditions in the planning and evaluation of thermal inspections is crucial. Additionally, the complex inner structure of wind turbine blades in comparison to other objects and buildings require a specific method referencing the individual rotor blades to each other. This allows the distinction between the thermal response of design-specific structural features and damages or irregularities between the three blades. We show thermal signatures of damage in rotor blades and contrast them with structural characteristics by comparing the three blades. In addition to measurements in industrial environments, laboratory measurements are shown and compared to simulations. The long-term goal is to simulate the influence of different weather parameters and thus gain a better understanding of measurements in the field. The results shown here can be seen as one step towards industrial application.
Contactless temperature sensing is state of the art and essential part of countless applications in the field of process control and automation. This contribution presents the case of a nondestructive thickness measurement method for polymeric coatings on concrete ground. Two pyrometers and a low-cost infrared camera were taken into account. The particular measurement results were compared with those of a more sophisticated infrared camera. It was found that the low-cost infrared camera has a lower noise level than the pyrometers, even for a single pixel. The opportunity to average over a large number of pixels and to establish a bias correction enables a further noise reduction by almost factor of 10. Furthermore, the temporal resolution of the infrared camera was investigated by means of a well-defined thermal oscillation. It could be demonstrated that the averaged time stamps are correct and the requirement of a minimum framerate of 50 Hz is met. Finally, the temperature transient on a polymer coated concrete block during and after a 10 s heating period was recorded with a pyrometer and the infrared camera. This experiment confirmed the suitability of the camera for the intended measurement method.
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