Pulse compression favorable thermal wave imaging methods for testing and evaluation of carbon fibre reinforced polymer

Non-destructive testing and evaluation methods demand various efficient post processing approaches to enhance their defect detection capabilities of the adopted technique. Among them, widely used statistical methods are Eigen domain based post processing approach such as principal component analysis and recently proposed correlation based pulse compression approach. In this work, experiments have been carried out to highlight the capabilities of these data processing schemes for detection of subsurface defects in fibre reinforced polymer test samples. Obtained results clearly show that the defect detection capability of the correlation (matched filter) based post processing approach is far superior than that of the principal component analysis based data processing approach. Further, the similarities and differences between these proposed methods have been highlighted.