Study of Finite Element Modeling of Pulsed Thermography

The modeling of pulsed thermography by finite element method has been the subject of numerous studies in the literature. In this paper, we studied the influence of the choice of shape function, of the mesh density and the time step on the calculation of the thermal response in such an modeling. For this, we performed numerical simulations in the case of a aluminum sample containing a round flat bottom hole, heated by a heat pulse of short duration. Results analysis showed the choice influence of the shape function and the mesh quality on the thermal contrast evolution as function of time. The study showed that the time step has no significant influence on the calculation of the thermal response.