A model for differential estimation of 3D thermal propagation by finite difference

Abstract

In this paper, a new mathematical model based on finite difference discretization of the Fourier’s 3D heat propagation model, is shown. From this one, a new technique is proposed to detect flaws in composite thin layers, under evaluation by a Pulsed Active Thermography experiment. The discrete model defined is easily adaptable to a spatial filter structure, which can be applied to the infrared sequence of images acquired from that thermography experiment, to obtain a better contrast between possible internal flaws and sound regions of material. The performance of the technique proposed is evaluated using artificial thermal sequences generated by ThermoCalc6L, software that is able to compute dynamic thermal distributions in anisotropic layered solids, simulating defects and different excitation sets. Results show that this technique offers a better contrast between defect and background thermal information, than other common technique like Differential Absolute Contrast (DAC), and it runs faster than the classic 3D thermal filtering method.