Optical Coherence Tomography for Material Characterization

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive, contactless and high resolution imaging method, which allows the reconstruction of two or three dimensional depth-resolved images in turbid media. In the past 20 years, OCT has been extensively developed in the field of biomedical diagnostics, while OCT in the non-destructive testing (NDT) field is lagging far behind. The aim of this thesis is to use OCT as a novel NDT technique for material structure characterization and damage detection. Besides an overview of the OCT fundamentals and developments, the thesis is mainly driven by three tasks: instrument design, signal processing, and applications. An integrated OCT system working at a wavelength of 1550 nm has been built. It combines time domain (TD) and Fourier domain (FD) OCT to make the both types of measurement available in one instrument. TD-OCT has the advantage of a large A-scan range and high SNR, while FD-OCT system has tremendous superiority in fast imaging due to no movement of the reference mirror. These two kinds of measurement can be implemented based on the user request in the developed hybrid OCT system, e.g. improved imaging depth or speed. In TD-OCT, the envelope detector was selected as the ideal method for the demodulation of each axial signal. A bandpass filter and 2D median filter are applied before and after demodulation, respectively, to reduce OCT system and speckle noise. In FD-OCT, raw data was first processed to remove the influence from the optical source and dark noise of the CCD detectors. It was then linearly resampled to convert to evenly spaced intervals of wavenumber, instead of wavelength. With an inverse Fourier transform, one depth profile was recovered and a cross-sectional image was constructed by accumulating a series of depth profiles. The quality of cross-sectional images can be further improved by merging multiple images with different pathlength offsets. The application of the designed OCT system was mainly focused on glass fiber composites and the microstructure of the specimens was displayed by either cross-sectional or volumetric images. Special attention was given to delamination growth in a glass fiber composite for wind turbine blade applications. The glass fiber composite was tested by incremental loading. Volumetric images obtained by OCT were further processed to reconstruct 3D crack surface profiles, from which a full field view of the delamination crack was given, providing substantial information for the study of crack growth in the composites. Additionally, the study explored the use of optical coherence elastography (OCE) for the deformation measurement of glass fiber composites, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. The developed OCE system based on speckle tracking was first evaluated by a test of ridge body translation. Then experiments were implemented for a set of glass fiber composites under tensile testing and three point bending. The results show that OCE can measure the internal displacements of a glass fiber composite in the range from a few micrometers to hundreds of micrometers. Besides, other applications are also presented in the thesis. These include defects and thickness measurement of polymer coating and the microstructure characterization of a wooden-panel painting. The results show the designed OCT system also has high potential for these alternative applications. Recommendations for further improvement to the OCT design and the applications are presented at the end of the thesis