Simultaneous materials evaluation with both electronic shearography and infrared nondestructive evaluation

With the increasing use of advanced materials in the aerospace, automotive, and medical industries, improved nondestructive evaluation techniques are needed to meet industry requirements for quality and product reliability. Both shearography and infrared thermography are noncontact, single-sided inspection techniques that can provide quantitative information about a material's characteristics by means of passive or active excitation techniques. An experiment was conducted using a focal plane array infrared camera and a traditional Michelson's shearing interferometric system. In this paper, the results of the experiment are discussed, and the advantages of using both shearography and thermography simultaneously for materials evaluation and nondestructive testing are presented.