TeraHertz inspections of painted steel samples

Abstract

Aerospace industry needs accurate coating thickness measurement as well as adhesion testing for preventing the corrosion of wear of metal substrates. In this frame, a constant attention is towards the potentialities offered by non-invasive sensing techniques and their technological advancements. This communication deals with THz surveys of painted steel samples. Specifically, we account for time of flight THz imaging, enhanced by a noise filtering procedure based on the Singular Value Decomposition of the data matrix. This analysis allowed for detecting paint coating layers and providing images of them and of the probed face of the steel substrate.