An improved magnetic dipole model for MFL testing based on non-uniform magnetic charge distribution

Magnetic flux leakage (MFL) signal prediction is important in ferromagnetic defect evaluation and reconstruction. At present, the magnetic dipole model (MDM) is the most widely applied method because of its high efficiency. However, it has low accuracy when applied to analysing complex defects (complex in profile and magnetic permeability) due to the original setting of uniform magnetic charge distribution. To solve the issue, this paper proposes an improved MDM method for MFL inspection of ferromagnetic materials by calculating the non-uniform magnetic charge distribution. It partly applies the finite volume method (FVM) to derive the magnetic charge distribution on the defect surface, which makes it able to take into account the defect’s profile and magnetic permeability distribution. The new magnetic charge distribution can increase the MDM’s accuracy for complex defect MFL field prediction with little extra cost. Experimental results show that, when compared with traditional MDM, the proposed one can achieve a maximum 69% decrease in root mean squared error when analysing complex defects. Compared with the numerical method, the computation time could reach a great reduction.