Speakers
Description
Ceramic additive manufacturing enables the layer-by-layer fabrication of complex ceramic components, usually through an indirect process involving debinding and sintering. Material Extrusion (MEX) is a promising and cost-effective method in which a ceramic-loaded pellet feedstock is extruded to produce a green part. This approach offers high material efficiency, process flexibility, and strong potential for industrial-scale ceramic manufacturing. Alongside these advances arises the need to demonstrate that such additively manufactured ceramic components meet safety and reliability requirements.
This study focuses on active infrared thermography, a non-destructive testing method that is gaining increasing relevance due to its rapid inspection capability, need for only one-sided access (reflection mode), and high sensitivity to subsurface defects. The effectiveness of active thermography is influenced by several factors, including environmental conditions, intrinsic material properties such as surface emissivity, and operator-dependent parameters such as experimental setup and scanning strategy.
In this work, a robotized line-scan thermography approach is investigated. This technique enables precise and repeatable scanning of components by maintaining uniform inspection conditions through robotic control. The high repeatability allows for systematic evaluation of independent variables and their influence on defect detection and quantitative assessment.
The effect of thermal excitation is evaluated in this study through multiple line-scans, using a heating source with adjustable focus to apply different energy levels to the surface of the inspected components. Analysis of the acquired thermographic sequences identifies optimal excitation parameters that enhances defect detection in the additively manufactured ceramic materials considered. A comparison with other NDT methods was done, to show the prospects offered by such adapted use of line-scan thermography.
