Discontinuities Location and Assessment of SCF from Thermoelastic Data

An algorithm is proposed for the analysis of thermoelastic SPATE data able at the same time to perform the polynomial smoothing, automatically locate geometric discontinuities (such as edges) and assess the stress concentration factor. The algorithm is based on the minimisation of the error calculated at points affected by the presence of the edge, here used as control points, between the signal read and a virtual signal calculated from the extrapolating polynomial using the adequate weight function. Analyses of experimental data are carried out and encouraging results are reported for either the location of edges and the assessment of stress concentration factors.