IrNdt - Excitation sources

LockIn-thermography normally uses halogen lamps as emitter to generate radiation of heat. These lamps are very uncomplicated in use and they mostly deliver meaningful results.

Inspections of components which are very conductible to heat radiations use pulse thermography with a flash generator as excitation source. The advantage of this excitation is the a fast progression of high-powered radiations which spread in wide-areas.

The excitation with lasers is very advantageous for a lot of applications. Especially ndt systems which need a focused emitting-signal use it a lot because it enables you to adjust the excitation in anuncomplicated way.

Sometimes lock-in thermography excites components withultrasonic radiation. In this way you can locate defects which cause a transformation from ultrasound to mechanical energy, e.g. friction. The resulting heat can be easily detected by an infrared camera.

The stimulation by induction is a very interesting alternative to optical stimulation because the eddy current excites no absorption of light on a component surface. Sometimes optical absoption causes useless measurement results and a lot of applications use eddy current as excitation source for avoiding this problem.