Modeling of thermal non-destructive evaluation techniques for composite materials

The inspection of composite structures by thermal non-destructive evaluation (TNDE) techniques based on Infrared Thermography is relatively common in the aerospace industry. However, state-of-the-art is far to be reached and there is still place for substantial improvement, in terms of development of the inspection procedures, optimization of the experimental set-up and assessment of the inversion algorithms. This requires the availability of large amounts of reference data, which can be provided in a cost-effective way by mathematically modeling the thermal behavior of the inspected structures. The numerical simulation of procedures for thermographic inspection is investigated in this work. The analysis is focused on the strategies that can be implemented to model the heat conduction processes in composite structures typical of TNDE procedures by means of commercial software packages for coupled mechanical-thermal analyses. The results of a pilot application of a commercial software packages to a real case are finally presented.