• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.370-376
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• 2016

Corrosion on the surface of a structure can generate cracks or cause walls to thin. This can lead to fracturing, which can eventually lead to fatalities and property loss. In an effort to prevent this, laser imaging technology has been used over the last ten years to detect thin-plate structure, or relatively thin piping. The most common laser imaging was used to develop a new technology for inspecting and imaging a desired area in order to scan various structures for thin-plate structure and thin piping. However, this method builds images by measuring waves reflected from defects, and subsequently has a considerable time delay of a few milliseconds at each scanning point. In addition, the complexity of the system is high, due to additional required components, such as laser-focusing parts. This paper proposes a laser imaging method with an increased scanning speed, based on excitation and the measurement of standing waves in structures. The wavenumber of standing waves changes at sections with a geometrical discontinuity, such as thickness. Therefore, it is possible to detect defects in a structure by generating standing waves with a single frequency and scanning the waves at each point by with the laser scanning system. The proposed technique is demonstrated on a wall-thinned plate with a linear thickness variation.