Investigation of defect characteristics and heat transfer in step heating thermography of metal plates repaired with composite patches

•Infrared thermography of repaired metal plate with composite patch has been modeled.•Effect of defect type, size and depth on the detection ability has been investigated.•Appropriate heating method to enhance the probability of detection has been found. Nowadays, composite patches are widely used in different industries to repair damaged metal structures. Inspection of such repaired structures is always considered as a challenging task. Different thermography methods such as step heating are commonly used to inspect repaired structures. Some parameters such as defect features or heating procedure play major roles in defect detection. In this work, in order to investigate such effects, step heating thermography of an aluminum plate repaired with a composite patch is modeled and tested. The main goal of this study is to evaluate the effects of defect type (delamination and disbond), size and depth on the detection ability of the test. Moreover, regarding the heat transfer process obtained from the simulation, the appropriate heating procedure for inspecting the repaired metal structures is determined. To validate the simulation outputs, experimental results corresponding to the temperature variations are compared with those predicted from the simulation.