Thin thermally grown oxide thickness detection in thermal barrier coatings based on SWT-BP neural network algorithm and terahertz technology.

Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy is a contactless and nondestructive testing technique that is often used to measure the thickness of layered materials. However, the technique presents limited thickness detection resolution, especially in the thin thermally grown oxide (TGO) of thermal barrier coatings whose thickness is below 30 µm. In this study, an SWT-BP algorithm combining a stationary wavelet transform (SWT) and a backpropagation (BP) neural network was proposed, and the regression coefficient of SWT-detailed results was 0.92. The prediction results were in good agreement with the real-time results; it demonstrated that the proposed algorithm was able to achieve a thickness prediction of up to 1-29 µm of the TGO. The proposed algorithm is suitable for thin thickness detection of the TGO.