BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods

Visit of Hamburg University of Technology at Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM) Today Prof. Irina Smirnova and myself visited the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung and had very interesting and exciting discussion on existing and future cooperation. The meeting was organised by Prof. Norbert Huber, who is affiliated with both institutions. Of particular interest of our discussion were cooperations in material sciences for our excellence cluster proposal BlueMat, where BAM is involved already, off-shore wind energy, composite materials, research data management and open science. We share the vision of Engineering to Face Climate Change. Thank you very much for hosting us Prof. Norbert Huber, Vice-President and Prof. Ulrich Panne, President of BAM. We are looking forward to intensify our cooperation with you.

📣Towards new possibilities in quality assurance of metal 3D printing: Our colleague, Simon Oster, has published a new article titled “Local porosity prediction in metal powder bed fusion using in-situ thermography: A comparative study of machine learning techniques” (find it https://lnkd.in/eu3sxE9k) in the Elsevier Additive Manufacturing. The paper was made possible with the support of the co-authors: Nils Scheuschner and Simon Altenburg from BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods, as well as Keerthana Chand from division 8.5 (X-Ray Imaging) in Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung. A big thank you to them for their contributions! ❔But what is it all about? Currently, to ensure the safety of critical PBF-LB/M parts, they often need to be tested by ex-situ methods such as X-ray computed tomography which is quite time and cost intensive. In-situ thermography promises great potential for the prediction of porosity, but the link between the acquired data and the emerged pores is not straightforward. In this context, the use of Machine Learning (ML) becomes more and more popular. However, the ultimate potential of thermography and ML for flaw prediction in PBF-LB/M as well as the necessary model capacity is not fully understood yet. 💡This is where Simon’s research comes in: Different classical ML techniques and a new Deep Learning approach for image sequences are compared to document their efficacy for local porosity prediction. It is shown that a feature-based model can predict layer-wise porosity changes as well as local porosity distribution with high accuracy in an unseen specimen – also for random flaws! This paves the way for printing safety-critical parts without the need of cost and time-intensive ex-situ testing! 🚀🚀 If you have any questions and are interested in what we do, please do get in touch! And don’t forget to follow us!

We are pleased to welcome Mahdi Abidi as a student assistant at BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods! 📑 Mahdi is currently pursuing his master degree in engineering informatics at Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin, where he first explored Additive Manufacturing during an internship. 🌟 Since joining our team, his interest in this field has only grown. We’re thrilled to see how his enthusiasm, curiosity, and dedication will drive innovative contributions in Additive Manufacturing. 🎥 In his current role at Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung, Mahdi is collaborating closely with researchers Alec Hilberg and Julien Lecompagnon on distinct metal additive manufacturing projects. In one project, he is applying his skills in data analytics, image processing, and machine learning to monitor powder direct energy deposition using multispectral thermography (QT-LPA).In the second project, Mahdi is contributing to the improvement of our division’s OpenBIS-based data management system alongside Julien Lecompagnon. We’re confident that this hands-on experience will not only strengthen his technical abilities but also provide valuable support to our team. ⚽ Outside of his studies and work, Mahdi enjoys an active lifestyle. Football is his passion, and he’s always on the lookout for new fitness activities. 🙌 If you’re interested in student assistant roles or collaborative projects, please reach out!

🛌⏰ Don't sleep on the newest developments in the in-situ process monitoring of additively manufactured parts and have a look at this interesting article about two different approaches that are being investigated at Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung. 🎥🔌 In a joint effort our colleagues Simon Altenburg from BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods and Matthias Pelkner from BAM 8.4 - Acoustic and Electromagnetic Methods explain how thermography or eddy current testing can be used to handle associated challenges and to improve quality control!

The president of Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung, Ulrich Panne, visited BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods this week. 🏢✨   Along with his team, Prof. Panne visited our office and labs in Adlershof, Berlin. 🌍 Apart from discussions with the head of our division BAM8.3, Mathias Ziegler, Prof. Panne visited each of our labs (additive manufacturing, laser thermography, and wind turbine blades inspection) to better understand and experience first-hand our current research activities and to discuss with us how our research fits into the context of BAM’s outlook for the future. 🔬🛠️🌬️   In addition to lab visits, we got an opportunity to directly pose questions to him, to better understand what his tasks are as the president, specific questions regarding research funding, research positions, and how he and BAM leadership see the role of BAM in the next few years. 💬🤝   We are happy to have had this opportunity to meet him, thus bridging a gap between the scientific staff that engage daily with interesting scientific questions and the leadership team that is tasked with strategy planning and justifying research directions to our primary funding institution, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. 🌟🔗

Working in the field of #ProcessMonitoring of #PBFLBM processes, soon everyone gets to the point of wanting to measure occuring temperatures 🌡️ One big pain point here is the unknown emissivity. 👩🔬At the Rapid.Tech 2024 in Erfurt I could already give a teaser on our new paper on the subject of emissivity of PBF-LB/M surfaces. 📄Now our paper, a collaborativ work of BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods Thermographic Methods and Center for Applied Energy Research (CAE) is finally online and published open access at Progress in Additive Manufacturing: https://lnkd.in/eWEKvkky Have a look 📚 #rapidtech #AM #additive #AdditiveManufacturing

🔍 After a long search, we are very happy to welcome our new secretary, Josphine Prescher to BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods. 👏  Josephine will support us with administrative tasks that scientists and engineers tend to generally avoid and postpone until the deadline. Her organisation skills and support are gratefully welcome and we wish her all the best in her current training programs as she settles in Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung.  🏊♀️ Apart from her work, Josephine likes to do sports and otherwise spends her time travelling with her daughter. 🛫 🎉 We wish her all the best in her career and are very glad to have her in our team! ✨

Layers of the past - BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods at Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin Campus Wilhelminenhof Schöneweide.  A request from Prof. Dr. Lutz Strobach from Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin / University for Applied Sciences 🏛️ gave the team from BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods the opportunity to make its expertise available for the preservation and restoration of cultural assets 🖼️.  The object of the investigations was a historic two-seater aircraft ✈️, a Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann, which is currently being restored at the HTW Campus Wilhelminenhof Schöneweide 🛠️.  BAM's task here was to use flash thermography 📸, a well-established technique of active thermography, and of course to proceed with extreme caution to answer the question⚠️: ‘What lies beneath the layers of the past 🤔?’. The idea was to make layers of paint visible that had already been painted over 🎨.  As the layers of paint are super thin, we opted for ultra-short heating using high-energy flash lamps 🔆. Investigations were carried out in advance to determine the applicability and the harmlessness of the technique for the test problem.  The resulting measurement setup in a reflection configuration (infrared camera and flash heating units in front of the measurement object) with two flash lamps of 6 kJ each at one metre and an infrared camera in the MWIR wavelength range (3-5 µm) can be seen in the picture.    Thermographic sequences are recorded before, during and after the flash heating. The results are analysed, as differential thermograms, which means that a reference thermogram before heating is subtracted from the subsequent thermograms after heating. This reduces interfering influences from the surrounding area. Because of the thin layers of paint, we concentrated on thermograms that appear very shortly after heating by the flash lamps 🔆.  One result of their joint investigations shows that there are indeed older layers of paint with historical content - underlined lettering DVL and two surrounding octagons on the thermogram on the right - under the green, military-looking layer of paint with the two capital letters N and F (photo left). This result will be a decisive step forward in proving that this aircraft had a civilian past 😮.  More information and the background of this activity can be found here: https://lnkd.in/eduiYQ3S  Do follow us for more such updates. If you have any ideas for collaborations, please do contact us! 🤝

Our colleague Julien Lecompagnon has joined the new working committee “NA 062-11-05 AA - Artificial intelligence in non-destructive testing” as deputy convenor and will be working on standardizing the implications arising from the use of artificial intelligence in non-destructive testing. We wish him every success in this task! 🌡 🤖

We were happy to have Rosa Tapia as a Masters’ student and student worker for 10 months at BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods and Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung. Rosa has a background in Electrical Engineering 💡, having earned her Bachelor of Science degree at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA 🇺🇸. She also has significant professional experience in electrical system design, project management, and consulting in industries such as hydropower and rural electrification 🏞️. Currently pursuing a Masters’ in Non-destructive testing (NDT) 🔬 at Dresden International University (DIU), Rosa joined BAM8.3 - Thermographic Methods in November 2023 for an internship in the implementation of lock-in thermography for fatigue testing of welded steel specimens in a collaborative project within #BAM 🤝. She continued from the internship and did her Masters’ thesis project with us, where she, along with Somsubhro Chaudhuri, implemented lock-in thermography during the fatigue testing of welded and corroded specimens, with the latter in collaboration with Soete Laboratory - Ghent University and Seyed Ahmad Elahi, as a part of Ahmad’s PhD project on the modelling of short crack fatigue growth from corrosion pits in offshore wind turbine monopile structures 💨. In her thesis, she was successfully able to implement lock-in thermography (in post-processing) to estimate fatigue crack initiation life and compare it with another NDT technique (strain gauging) that was used in parallel 📊. We wish her all the best for her MSc Thesis submission and presentation, and for future endeavours! 🎉