Papers by Umberto Galietti
Applied Sciences
In this study, we characterize the lateral dimension, depth, and inclination of buried tilted rec... more In this study, we characterize the lateral dimension, depth, and inclination of buried tilted rectangular heat sources from time domain temperature data measured at the surface. The heat sources are representative for planar defects that emit heat in thermographic tests with internal burst excitation. We present a semi-analytical expression for the evolution of the surface temperature distribution. The emitted flux, dimensions and inclination of the heat source are determined by fitting the model to two perpendicular surface temperature profiles and the temperature history at one point of the surface. We show that the sensitivity of the data to the geometrical parameters of the heat source decreases as the angle it makes with the surface increases. The study also shows that the optimum duration of the excitation corresponds to a thermal diffusion length covering the distance from the surface to the deepest end of the heat source. The accuracy and precision of the results for differe...
This paper presents a complete pipeline for automatic detection and classification of defects wit... more This paper presents a complete pipeline for automatic detection and classification of defects within composite laminates inspected by active IR thermography. Specifically, long-pulse thermography is proposed for nondestructive evaluation of samples made of Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP). A model approximation based on exponential functions is used to achieve an efficient representation of temperature decays at the surface of the samples. At the end of the pipeline, several decision forests are implemented to process input features and label corresponding areas among three classes of interest: sound regions, surface defects, and in-depth discontinuities. Results prove that the proposed methodology performs with good accuracy also in case of inspection of GFRP samples tested by long-pulse thermography.
International Journal of Thermal Sciences, 2020
Abstract The dual color infrared thermography is a non-intrusive temperature measurement techniqu... more Abstract The dual color infrared thermography is a non-intrusive temperature measurement technique, based on the ratio principle between the signals collected at two near wavelengths in local grey body hypotheses and applicable when a thermal camera is equipped with a suitable pair of narrow band filters. In this work, the applicability at high temperatures has been investigated by using an analytical model based on Planck's Law integration, convoluted with the real response curves of sensors, optics, filters and attenuators. The presented model has been validated at high temperature and used to optimize the hardware set up for dual color measurements both in terms of operative spectral band and also for choosing the best pair of filters. Furthermore, spectral emissivity trend curves for different materials, available in literature, and at different temperatures have been used in the theoretical model in order to simulate and replicate experimental results. The experimental simulations obtained with dual color technique have been compared with those obtained through classical techniques based on the a priori knowledge and setting of the emissivity average values. The aim is to establish in which conditions and for which class of Thermal Protection System (TPS) materials used to protect the inner cold structure of hypersonic space vehicles made of aluminium or metallic alloys, the dual color technique can be used for a more accurate and precise temperature measurement compared to the classical techniques. The applicability study was carried out up to high temperature (2000 °C) which are reached by the TPS surfaces during the re-entry phase from Earth orbit or from interplanetary trajectories due to the high heat flux loads produced by the strong shock wave during the deceleration phase.
Proceedings of SPIE, Mar 15, 2002
ABSTRACT
International Journal of Materials & Product Technology, 2000
The economic benefits of Genetically Modified (GM) crops in developing countries have been well d... more The economic benefits of Genetically Modified (GM) crops in developing countries have been well documented, but little research has been undertaken to date on the impacts of GM adoption on household livelihoods. The research reported here aimed to assess the livelihood impacts of the adoption of Bt cotton in South Africa., and involved 100 interviews of resource-poor farmers growing Bt cotton in Makhathini Flats, South Africa. Some 88% of respondents reported a higher income from Bt compared to non-Bt varieties previously grown by them, and this higher income was used primarily for greater education of their children (76%), more investment in growing cotton (46%), repaying debt (28%), investment in other crops (20%) and spending money on themselves. Some 89% had increased their asset base due to Bt cotton, primarily by increasing their cultivable land. These benefits of Bt adoption appeared widespread regardless of gender or farm size.
2022 8th International Conference on Control, Decision and Information Technologies (CoDIT), May 17, 2022
The fatigue crack growth is strictly related to the dissipated energy at the notch/crack tip. Amo... more The fatigue crack growth is strictly related to the dissipated energy at the notch/crack tip. Among the different approaches developed, those focusing their attention on energy dissipated in the plastic area seems to be more promising in the evaluation of the crack growth behaviour and it can be used to describe the plastic work at the crack tip. In this work, an experimental approach was adopted in order to obtain thermographic parameters capable of describing the plastic work at the crack tip. In particular, the influence of tests parameters such as the loading frequency, has been investigated.
Non-destructive testing is essential for the thorough assessment of production processes of compl... more Non-destructive testing is essential for the thorough assessment of production processes of complex materials, such as composites. This paper presents a complete algorithm to detect subsurface defects, e.g. extended delaminations or local resin pockets, by comparing the outputs produced by lock-in thermography for the inspection of master pristine samples and the current ones under testing. The use of lock-in thermography produces amplitude and phase maps. Focusing on amplitudes, dataset are first made comparable in both magnitude spans and spatial positions exploiting image normalization and alignment. Then local patches in actual correspondence are cross-correlated to further improve their alignment and estimate a similarity measurement. Differences in thermal behaviors detected by the proposed processing underlie subsurface defects. These outcomes have been also proven by experimental investigations performed on a carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) T-joint.
NDT & E international, Dec 1, 2021
Abstract Adhesive bonding is a material joining process in which an adhesive, placed between the ... more Abstract Adhesive bonding is a material joining process in which an adhesive, placed between the surfaces, solidifies to produce a strong bond. In this regard, adhesively bonded joints represent an interesting alternative to mechanical joints and provide many advantages over conventional mechanical fasteners: continuity of the structure, high strength-to-weight ratio, design flexibility, and easiness of fabrication. In the present research, the Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA) technique has been used as a non-destructive tool for evaluating the mechanical behaviour of aeronautical adhesive bonded CFRP T-joints made by automated fibre placement process. Moreover, the thermoelastic signal was used for determining the debonded areas after the pull-off tests. The results in terms of the measured debonded area were compared to the well-established lock-in thermography technique. The capability of the Thermoelastic Stress Analysis to perform an in-depth study of the quality of T-joints has been demonstrated.
This paper presents a complete framework aimed to nondestructive inspection of composite material... more This paper presents a complete framework aimed to nondestructive inspection of composite materials. Starting from the acquisition, performed with lock-in thermography, the method flows through a set of consecutive blocks of data processing: input enhancement, feature extraction, classification and defect detection. Experimental results prove the capability of the presented methodology to detect the presence of defects underneath the surface of a calibrated specimen made of Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP). Results are also compared with those obtained by other techniques, based on different features and unsupervised learning methods. The comparison further proves that the proposed methodology is able to reduce the number of false positives, while ensuring the exact detection of subsurface defects.
NDT & E international, Mar 1, 2019
In the field of NDT techniques for aeronautic components of composite materials, the development ... more In the field of NDT techniques for aeronautic components of composite materials, the development of automatic and robust approaches for defect detection is largely desirable for both safety and economic reasons. This paper introduces a novel methodology for the automatic analysis of thermal signals resulting from the application of pulsed thermography. Input thermal decays are processed by a proper FIR filter designed to reduce the measurement noise, and then modeled to represent both sound regions and defective ones. Output signals are thus fitted on an exponential model, which approximates thermal contrasts with three robust parameters. These features feed a decision forest, trained to detect discontinuities and characterize their depths. Several experiments on actual sample laminates have proven the increase of the classification performance of the proposed approach with respect to related ones in terms of the reduction of missing predictions of defective classes.
Optics and Lasers in Engineering, Oct 1, 2021
Abstract This paper presents a complete procedure for the non-destructive analysis of composite l... more Abstract This paper presents a complete procedure for the non-destructive analysis of composite laminates, taking advantage of the step-heating infrared thermography and the latest developments of deep neural networks. One-dimensional temperature profiles of the target surface are collected in response to long heat pulses and individually feed a compact network made of convolutional filters, self-tuned to represent the signals in an equivalent feature space of improved discrimination. The resulting features are then classified to obtain the complete three-dimensional characterization of the properties of possible subsurface defects. Experimental validation is proposed to investigate a laminate of glass-fiber-reinforced polymer with several flat-bottom holes by changing the duration of the input heat pulses. This test produces surprisingly good results in the characterization of three classes of defects of increasing depth, including the most challenging at a depth of 6.38 mm, i.e. at the limit of applicability of the step-heating thermography. In the case of an excitation length of 180 s, the average balanced accuracy, precision, and recall are equal to 84.03%, 87.62%, and 82.43%, respectively. Moreover, a threshold operation on the classification scores further boosts the recall values of the class of the deepest defects from 53.87% to 82.41%. This enhancement of sensitivity suggests the applicability of the proposed procedure for the automatic inspection of composites structures in all application fields where safety is mandatory.
Fatigue & Fracture of Engineering Materials & Structures, Aug 12, 2018
Infrared thermography allows an alternative energy-based approach for studying the fatigue behavi... more Infrared thermography allows an alternative energy-based approach for studying the fatigue behaviour of materials to better understand damage phenomena. In particular, the methodology of infrared thermography can explain the complex dissipative mechanisms promoted by the input parameters, such as the loading ratio, can rapidly provide information about the fatigue strength, and has low cost. In this work, analysis of the thermographic sequences of ASTM A 182 grade F6NM steel obtained during fatigue testing provided four thermal indexes that were used to investigate the thermoelastic and plastic behaviour of material. Fatigue tests at two opportunely chosen loading ratios (R = −0.1, R = 0.5) were performed to investigate the relation between the material behaviour and each index at a specific loading ratio. Finally, estimation of the fatigue strength by means of suitable analysis procedures allowed for an investigation of the damage behaviour of materials under specific loading conditions.
Composites Part B-engineering, Feb 1, 2018
Pulsed thermography has been used for many years to investigate the presence of subsurface defect... more Pulsed thermography has been used for many years to investigate the presence of subsurface defects in composite materials for aeronautics. Several methods have been proposed but only few of them include a complete automated approach for the effective defect characterization. This paper presents a novel method which approximates the thermal decays on the laminate surface, induced by a short heat pulse, by means of an exponential model in three unknowns (model parameters), estimated in the least squares sense. These parameters are discriminant and noise-insensitive features used to feed several classifiers, which are trained to label possible defects according to their depths. Experimental tests have been performed on a carbon-fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) laminate having four inclusions of known properties. The comparative analysis of the proposed classifiers has demonstrated that the best results are achieved by a decision forest made of 30 trees. In this case the mean values of standard and balanced accuracies reach 99.47% and 86.9%, whereas precision and recall are 89.87% and 73.67%, respectively.
Surface & Coatings Technology, Nov 1, 2013
TiAlN/AlN multilayers are attracting great interest for the possibility to modulate their mechani... more TiAlN/AlN multilayers are attracting great interest for the possibility to modulate their mechanical and tribological properties through the variation of multilayer design. In this work TiAlN single layer, TiAlN/AlN intermixed-multilayer and nano-multilayer were prepared using a reactive magnetron sputtering system starting from targets of TiAl and Al. The aim is to analyze how the multilayer design affects the thermal and tribological properties of the coatings. The microstructure of as-deposited and annealed films has been studied using X-ray diffraction. The chemical composition has been deduced by XPS analyses. Thermal behavior was assessed by means of differential thermal analysis (DTA) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), while mechanical properties have been investigated by wear tests.
The Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA) is a contactless technique based on the thermoelastic eff... more The Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA) is a contactless technique based on the thermoelastic effect that consists of the generation of small temperature variations caused by the volume variations induced by stresses applied in the linearelastic range. Recent works demonstrated the capability of the TSA for the characterization of materials behaviour in presence of residual stresses. The use of a general TSA analytical expression allows the researchers to find a relationship between the amplitude of the thermal signal varying at the same frequency as the applied load and the characteristics of the residual stress tensor in terms of principal stresses and their direction. The just said relationship, under certain conditions, can be also affected by the uncertainty in the knowledge of the thermo-physical properties of the material which can enhance or blur the presence of residual stresses. In this work, the effect of the main variables, such as the material properties and the presence of residual stress on the TSA were investigated by applying a sensitivity analysis to the analytical general model. The analytical results were then verified and compared with TSA experimental measurements performed on AA2024 samples affected by biaxial residual stresses and the residual stresses measured with a standard test method.
Lecture notes in civil engineering, 2021
Aluminium alloys present some criticalities in terms of fatigue life characterisation due to the ... more Aluminium alloys present some criticalities in terms of fatigue life characterisation due to the absence of a point representing the ‘fatigue limit’, the topic becomes complicated when the material is welded. In this case, the fatigue characterisation lies on design specifications which have to clearly explain the guidelines for the performing the tests and for evaluating the failures, in order to design tailored welded joints. However, the fatigue of welded joints is a difficult subject since the welding process makes the material different, introducing residual tensions, defect, etc. Also, the standard test methods provide only the estimation of the strength at fixed loading cycles but no information on the damage processes occurring in the material. Prompted by these issues researchers deal with the study of other approaches to achieve not only information on fatigue resistance but also damage information. In particular, the thermography can be used for thermal signal analysis of dissipative heat sources involved in fatigue of material undergoing cyclic test. In this paper, this approach is adopted to study the fatigue behavior of friction stir welded joints of AA5754-H111 during specific loading conditions. The component of the temperature related to intrinsic dissipations is assessed and the fatigue strength is evaluated together with a graphical study of the location of damaged areas.
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Papers by Umberto Galietti