Detection of a Surface-Breaking Crack Using the Surface Wave of a Laser Ultrasound

A laser ultrasonic inspection system is a non-contact inspection device which generates and measures ultrasounds by using laser beams. A laser ultrasonic inspection system provides a high measurement resolution because the ultrasonic signal generated by a pulse laser beam has a wide-band spectrum and the ultrasonic signal is measured from a small focused spot of a measuring laser beam. In this paper, we have investigated the detection techniques of a surface-breaking crack by using the laser ultrasonic surface waves. A crack acts as a low pass filter whose cut-off frequency is lowered in proportion to the depth of a crack. And, the center frequency value of a spectrum is decreased in proportion to the depth of a crack. In this paper, we extracted the crack information by using the frequency attenuation from the normalized transfer function spectrum of a surface-breaking crack. Also, we effectively measured the crack depth by using the decreasing value of the center frequency from a crack passed ultrasonic signal. The proposed measuring techniques of crack depths provided more precise information than the amplitude measuring technique