An Exploratory Study on the Optimized Test Conditions of the Lock-in Thermography Technique

This work is devoted to the technique application of lock-in infrared thermography in the shipbuilding and ocean engineering industry. For this purpose, an exploratory study to find the optimized test conditions is carried out by the design of experiments. It has been confirmed to be useful method that the phase contrast images were quantified by a reference image and weighted by defect hole size. Illuminated optical intensity of lower or medium strength give a good result for getting a phase contrast image. In order to get a good phase contrast image, lock-in frequency factors should be high in proportion to the illuminated optical intensity. The integration time of infrared camera should have been inversely proportional to the optical intensity. The other hand, the difference of specimen materials gave a slightly biased results not being discriminative reasoning