Ultrasound excited thermography: an efficient tool for the characterization of vertical cracks

Ultrasound excited thermography has gained a renewed interest in the last two decades as a nondestructive testing technique aimed at detecting and characterizing surface breaking and shallow subsurface discontinuities. It is based on measurement of the IR radiation emitted by the specimen surface to detect temperature rises produced by the heating of defects under high amplitude ultrasound excitation and is primarily addressed to flaws with contacting faces, such as kissing cracks or tight delaminations. The simplicity of application and the ability to detect small cracks in challenging media makes it an attractive emerging technology, which is still in a development stage. However, it has proven to provide an opportunity for the quantitative characterization of defects, mainly of vertical cracks. In this review, we present the principles of the technique and the different experimental implementations, we put it in context with other nondestructive tests and we summarize the work done in order to improve defect detectability and test reliability, with the final goal of determining the probability of detection. Then we review the contributions aimed at characterizing vertical cracks, i.e. retrieving the geometry and location of the crack from surface temperature data, generated by ultrasonic excitation. (topical review)