Inspection of delamination defect in first wall panel of Tokamak device by using laser infrared thermography technique

First wall panels (FWPs), which adjoin the inner wall of the blanket modules in the vacuum vessel (VV) of a Tokamak device, are in structures of multilayer bounded together with a solid welding technique in order to perform its heat exchange, VV protection, and neutron breeding functions. The quality of the welding joint between layers is the key factor for FWP integrity. In order to conduct online inspection of the delamination defect in the FWPs, a nondestructive testing (NDT) method capable to detect delamination defect without accessing into the VV is required. In this paper, the feasibility of the laser infrared thermography (LIRT) testing NDT method was investigated experimentally for this purpose. To clarify its detectability under practical VV environment, inspections of several inspection modes were conducted based on the practical structure of FWP and VV of the EAST Tokamak device, i.e., modes of different distances and angles of FWPs toward the LIRT transducers. In practice, an LIRT testing system was established and several double-layered plate specimens with different artificial delamination defects were inspected under the selected testing conditions. Through thermography signal reconstruction, an image processing algorithm was proposed and adopted to enhance the defect detectability. From the results of different inspection modes, it was found that the angle factor may worsen the inspection precision and reduce the detectability for delamination defects in case of big defect depth-to-width ratio, even though the LIRT method is still applicable for inspection of relative large defects in FWP. Finally, the detectability in different inspection modes was clarified, which proved the feasibility of LIRT for FWP online inspection.