Nondestructive characterization of fatigue damage with thermography

摘要

A thermal imaging NDE method has been developed for nondestructive characterization of early stages of fatigue damage. The method is based on evaluation of the thermal effects induced in a material by a short-term mechanical loading. The mechanical loading causes in addition to thermoelastic temperature change, an increase due to heat dissipation that depends upon the microstructure of the material in a characteristic manner. The origin of this heat dissipation is the mechanical damping process. Utilizing the initial temperature rise due to a short-term mechanical loading, the dissipated energy per cycle was evaluated as a thermal parameter. This new thermal NDE parameter allows a quantitative characterization of the mechanical hysteresis, without the need for calibration to eliminate influences of thermal boundary conditions. The measurement of the thermal NDE parameters has been performed on Ti-6Al-4V dog-bone specimens, fatigued in low cycle fatigue (LCF) as well as in high cycle fatigue (HCF) experiments. Characteristic dependence of the NDE parameters on the already accumulated fatigue damage has been observed. The advantage of the thermal method is the applicability to components under service conditions because of simplicity, rapid measurements (a few seconds) and the ability of locally resolved evaluations.