Pulsed thermography is a common technique for nondestructive testing (NDT) of materials. This study presents the apparent effusivity method for the quantitative evaluation of coating thickness in a one-sided thermal NDT procedure. The proposed algorithm is based on determining a threshold value of apparent effusivity, which can be found for particular coating-on-substrate structures. It has been found that the square root of the time at which the apparent effusivity curve reaches this threshold is proportional to the coating thickness. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated by analytical modeling and experimentation performed on thermally-sprayed coatings.

Three nondestructive testing techniques, namely, optically- and ultrasonically stimulated infrared thermography, ultrasonic laser vibrometry and laser ultrasonics, have been comparatively investigated in the inspection of a graphite-epoxy sample characterized by a complicated geometry to demonstrate advantages and drawbacks of each technique in the detection of different types of defects.