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Recent Advances and Applications of Infrared Thermography

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A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Optics and Lasers".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2020) | Viewed by 28500

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Special Issue Editor

Dr. Evangelos Z. Kordatos

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Guest Editor

Department of Engineering and Mathematics, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield S1 1WB, UK
Interests: the mechanical and thermal behaviour of advanced materials, such as metal matrix composites (MMCs), ceramic matrix composites (CMCs), carbon fibre-reinforced polymers (CFRPs), shape memory alloys (SMAs), smart materials
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Infrared thermography (IRT), as a non-destructive evaluation method, has been applied for the last five decades with great success in a broad spectrum of disciplines. Due to the continuous advances in sensor technology and electronics, IRT has evolved into a major, accurate, versatile, and well-established method for various applications. It has been employed in engineering, biomedicine, nuclear technology, physics, veterinary science, arts, cultural heritage, etc. Defect detection, thermal performance of buildings, monitoring of damage, diagnosis of medical conditions, art authenticity evaluation, assessment of culture heritage conditions, and many other applications have led the scientific community to develop and advance numerous methodologies based on infrared thermography, such as pulsed phase, lock-in, step, ultrasound, eddy current, thermo-electrical lock-in thermography, etc. This Special Issue of Applied Sciences focuses on the recent advances and applications of infrared thermography in a variety of disciplines. The aim of this issue is to attract research involving novel and advanced IRT methodologies or/and new applications that have an impact on the scientific community. Manuscripts that combine IRT with other non-destructive methodologies, as long as IRT is the main method, are also welcome.

Dr. Evangelos Z. Kordatos
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Infrared thermography
Non-destructive evaluation
Structural health monitoring
Sensors
Damage monitoring
Advanced image processing
Defect detection
Thermographic numerical simulations

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

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13 pages, 3003 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Thermography of Asteroid and Future Applications in Space Missions

by Tatsuaki Okada

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(6), 2158; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10062158 - 22 Mar 2020

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2322

Abstract

The Near-Earth Asteroid 162173 Ryugu is a C-type asteroid which preserves information about the ancient Solar System and is considered enriched in volatiles such as water and organics associated with the building blocks of life, and it is a potentially hazardous object that might impact Earth. Hayabusa2 is the asteroid explorer organized by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to rendezvous with the asteroid and collect surface materials to return them to Earth. Thermography has been carried out from Hayabusa2 during the asteroid proximity phase, to unveil the thermophysical properties of the primitive Solar System small body, which offered a new insight for understanding the origin and evolution of the Solar System, and demonstrated the technology for future applications in space missions. Global, local, and close-up thermal images taken from various distances from the asteroid strongly contributed to the mission success, including suitable landing site selection, safe assessment during descents into the thermal environments and hazardous boulder abundance, and the detection of deployable devices against the sunlit asteroid surface. Potential applications of thermography in future planetary missions are introduced. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances and Applications of Infrared Thermography)

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18 pages, 3865 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Novel Methodology for Condition Monitoring of Gear Wear Using Supervised Learning and Infrared Thermography

by Emmanuel Resendiz-Ochoa, Juan J. Saucedo-Dorantes, Juan P. Benitez-Rangel, Roque A. Osornio-Rios and Luis A. Morales-Hernandez

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(2), 506; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10020506 - 10 Jan 2020

Cited by 29 | Viewed by 3137

Abstract

In gearboxes, the occurrence of unexpected failures such as wear in the gears may occur, causing unwanted downtime with significant financial losses and human efforts. Nowadays, noninvasive sensing represents a suitable tool for carrying out the condition monitoring and fault assessment of industrial equipment in continuous operating conditions. Infrared thermography has the characteristic of being installed outside the machinery or the industrial process under assessment. Also, the amount of information that sensors can provide has become a challenge for data processing. Additionally, with the development of condition monitoring strategies based on supervised learning and artificial intelligence, the processing of signals with significant improvements during the classification of information has been facilitated. Thus, this paper proposes a novel noninvasive methodology for the diagnosis and classification of different levels of uniform wear in gears through thermal analysis with infrared imaging. The novelty of the proposed method includes the calculation of statistical time-domain features from infrared imaging, the consideration of a dimensionality reduction stage by means of Linear Discriminant Analysis, and automatic fault diagnosis performed by an artificial neural network. The proposed method is evaluated under an experimental laboratory data set, which is composed of the following conditions: healthy, and three severity degrees of uniform wear in gears, namely, 25%, 50%, and 75% of uniform wear. Finally, the obtained results are compared with classical condition monitoring approaches based on vibration analysis. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances and Applications of Infrared Thermography)

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29 pages, 10709 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Thermal Infrared Small Ship Detection in Sea Clutter Based on Morphological Reconstruction and Multi-Feature Analysis

by Yongsong Li, Zhengzhou Li, Yong Zhu, Bo Li, Weiqi Xiong and Yangfan Huang

Appl. Sci. 2019, 9(18), 3786; https://doi.org/10.3390/app9183786 - 10 Sep 2019

Cited by 23 | Viewed by 4656

Abstract

The existing thermal infrared (TIR) ship detection methods may suffer serious performance degradation in the situation of heavy sea clutter. To cope with this problem, a novel ship detection method based on morphological reconstruction and multi-feature analysis is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the TIR image is processed by opening- or closing-based gray-level morphological reconstruction (GMR) to smooth intricate background clutter while maintaining the intensity, shape, and contour features of ship target. Then, considering the intensity and contrast features, the fused saliency detection strategy including intensity foreground saliency map (IFSM) and brightness contrast saliency map (BCSM) is presented to highlight potential ship targets and suppress sea clutter. After that, an effective contour descriptor namely average eigenvalue measure of structure tensor (STAEM) is designed to characterize candidate ship targets, and the statistical shape knowledge is introduced to identify true ship targets from residual non-ship targets. Finally, the dual method is adopted to simultaneously detect both bright and dark ship targets in TIR image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the compared state-of-the-art methods, especially for infrared images with intricate sea clutter. Moreover, the proposed method can work stably for ship target with unknown brightness, variable quantities, sizes, and shapes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances and Applications of Infrared Thermography)

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14 pages, 320 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Ultrasonic Tomographic Technique and Its Applications

by Takashi Takiguchi

Appl. Sci. 2019, 9(5), 1005; https://doi.org/10.3390/app9051005 - 11 Mar 2019

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 4392

Abstract

X-ray tomography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are excellent techniques for non-destructive or non-invasive inspections, however, they have shotcomings including the expensive cost in both the devices themselves and their protection facilities, the harmful side effects of the X-rays to human bodies and to the environment. In view of this argument, it is necessary to develop new, inexpensive, safe and reliable tomographic techniques, especially in medical imaging and non-destructive inspections. There are new tomographic techniques under development such as optical tomography, photo-acoustic tomography, ultrasonic tomography and so on, from which we take ultrasonic tomography as the topic in this paper. We introduce a review of the known ultrasonic tomographic techniques and discuss their future development. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances and Applications of Infrared Thermography)

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9 pages, 1411 KiB

Open AccessArticle

New Insights in Potato Leaf Freezing by Infrared Thermography

by Matthias Stegner, Tanja Schäfernolte and Gilbert Neuner

Appl. Sci. 2019, 9(5), 819; https://doi.org/10.3390/app9050819 - 26 Feb 2019

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3469

Abstract

Infrared thermography has been widely used to study freezing processes in freezing resistant plants but hardly in freezing susceptible species. Solanum tuberosum leaves get frost killed at −3 °C and are unable to frost harden. The basic nature of frost injury to potato leaves is not clear. By employment of infrared differential thermal analysis (IDTA) in combination with viability assessment, we aimed to clarify the mechanistic relationship between ice formation and frost injury. During controlled freezing of potato leaves two distinct freezing events were detected by IDTA. During the first freezing event, the ice wave propagated via the xylem and spread out within 60 s throughout the whole leaf. When leaves were rewarmed after this freezing event, they did not show any frost injury symptoms. We suggest that this non-lethal first ice wave is restricted to the extracellular space. When leaves remained exposed after this exotherm, a second freezing event with a diffuse freezing pattern without a distinct starting point was recorded. When thawed after this second freezing event, leaves always showed frost damage suggesting intracellular freezing. The freezing behavior of potato leaves and its relation to frost damage corroborates that control of ice nucleation is a key for frost protection. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances and Applications of Infrared Thermography)

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Review

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18 pages, 23274 KiB

Open AccessReview

Matched-Filter Thermography

by Nima Tabatabaei

Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(4), 581; https://doi.org/10.3390/app8040581 - 08 Apr 2018

Cited by 18 | Viewed by 8573

Abstract

Conventional infrared thermography techniques, including pulsed and lock-in thermography, have shown great potential for non-destructive evaluation of broad spectrum of materials, spanning from metals to polymers to biological tissues. However, performance of these techniques is often limited due to the diffuse nature of thermal wave fields, resulting in an inherent compromise between inspection depth and depth resolution. Recently, matched-filter thermography has been introduced as a means for overcoming this classic limitation to enable depth-resolved subsurface thermal imaging and improving axial/depth resolution. This paper reviews the basic principles and experimental results of matched-filter thermography: first, mathematical and signal processing concepts related to matched-fileting and pulse compression are discussed. Next, theoretical modeling of thermal-wave responses to matched-filter thermography using two categories of pulse compression techniques (linear frequency modulation and binary phase coding) are reviewed. Key experimental results from literature demonstrating the maintenance of axial resolution while inspecting deep into opaque and turbid media are also presented and discussed. Finally, the concept of thermal coherence tomography for deconvolution of thermal responses of axially superposed sources and creation of depth-selective images in a diffusion-wave field is reviewed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances and Applications of Infrared Thermography)

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