skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Detection of Defects in Additively Manufactured Metallic Materials with Machine Learning of Pulsed Thermography Images

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1673390· OSTI ID:1673390
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4]
  1. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
  2. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States); Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL (United States)
  3. Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL (United States)
  4. Westinghouse Electric Company, Columbia, SC (United States)

Additive manufacturing (AM) is an emerging method for cost-efficient fabrication of nuclear reactor parts. AM of metallic structures for nuclear energy applications is currently based on laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) process, which can introduce internal material flaws, such as pores and anisotropy. Integrity of AM structures needs to be evaluated nondestructively because material flaws could lead to premature failures due to exposure to high temperature, radiation and corrosive environment in a nuclear reactor. Quality control (QC) requires nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of actual AM structures. Pulsed thermography is a potentially promising QC technique because it is scalable to arbitrary structure size. However, detection sensitivity of this method is limited by noises. We investigate separation of signal from noise in thermography images using several machine learning (ML) methods, including new spatio-temporal blind source separation (STBSS) and spatio-temporal sparse dictionary learning (STSDL) methods. Performance of the ML methods is benchmarked using thermography data obtained from imaging stainless steel 316L and Inconel 718 specimens produced LPBF method with imprinted calibrated porosity defects. The ML methods are ranked by F-score and execution runtime. The ML methods with higher accuracy require longer run time. However, this runtime is sufficiently short to perform QC within a realistic time frame.

Research Organization:
Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States); Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL (United States); Westinghouse Electric Company, Columbia, SC (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
DOE Contract Number:
AC02-06CH11357
OSTI ID:
1673390
Report Number(s):
ANL- 20/57; 162403; TRN: US2204396
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English