Pulse Compression with Gaussian Weighted Chirp Modulated Excitation for Infrared Thermal Wave Imaging

This paper proposes a novel signal processing approach to thermal non-destructive testing by incorporating Gaussian window function onto the linear frequency modulated incident heat flux to achieve better pulse compression properties. The present work highlights a finite element analysis based modeling and simulation technique in order to test the capabilities of the proposed windowing scheme over the conventional frequency modulated thermal wave imaging method. It is shown that by using Gaussian weighted chirp thermal stimulus, high depth resolution can be achieved.