Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA) is a form of differential infrared thermography which, by monitoring the small changes in surface temperature of a component under transient load, allows the change in stress on the surface of a component to be determined. This is because small changes in stress result in small changes in temperature, which can be detected using sensitive infrared camera systems.
Single crack
Fatigue crack idendification and monitoring is particularly well suited to thermoelastic stress analysis
Double crack
More than one crack can be monitored simultaneously, across the image field of view of the camera system
Dual crack growth
Larger fields of view allow longer cracks to be monitored with sub-millimetre precision, up to component failure
Translation stage
Low resolution infrared cameras can be combined with translation stages for mapping component surfaces
Data stitching
The resulting image tiles can then be stitched together for a continuous map of surface stresses