Noncontact Monitoring of Surface Temperature Distribution by Laser Ultrasound Scanning

A laser ultrasound scanning method for measuring a surface temperature distribution of a heated material is presented. An experiment using an aluminum plate heated up to 120 °C is carried out to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. A series of one-dimensional surface acoustic wave (SAW) measurements within an area of a square on the aluminum surface are performed by scanning a pulsed laser for generating SAW using a galvanometer system, where the SAWs are detected at a fixed location on the surface. An inverse analysis is then applied to SAW data to determine the surface temperature distribution in a certain direction. The two-dimensional distribution of the surface temperature in the square is constructed by combining the one-dimensional surface temperature distributions obtained within the square. The surface temperature distributions obtained by the proposed method almost agrees with those obtained using an infrared radiation camera.