Quality control of wood-based and composite materials by infrared thermography

The wood-based panel companies face their customer's increasing demand for high and constant quality of their products and for flexible production. At the same time, the cost pressure gets stronger. Quality assurance systems following standards such as ISO/DIN/EN 9000 become more and more important and require a careful monitoring of the production process and preventive measures to avoid production failures. In the view of high production speeds and the large number of different products, process integrated non-destructive testing methods are necessary for these tasks. Some non-destructive testing methods such as ultrasonic or optical techniques are already commercially available. However, these techniques do not always meet the high demands with respect to speed, reliability, and failure detection rate. Consequently, new techniques such as infrared thermography are attracting more and more interest.