Quantification of crack defect using a new pulsed eddy current probe

Abstract As one of the nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques, pulsed eddy current (PEC) NDT usually uses the reflection-type probe, which consists of a pancake exciting coil for generation of the incident magnetic field and a pick-up coil or a solid-state magnetic field sensor for detecting the perturbed magnetic field due to the presence of defects in conductors. Normally, during the signal processing, the difference process is needed, which involves the subtraction of reference signals from the testing transient signals to enhance the sensitivity of detection. In this paper, a new PEC probe is proposed for the quantification of cracks. The probe has the self-differential characteristic, and thus the difference process is no longer required. The principle of the new probe is analysed firstly. Following that, the performance of the new probe is compared with that of a traditional PEC probe by simulations and experiments. The results show that the proposed PEC probe is valid and advantageous over conventional probes in terms of higher accuracy in quantification of defects. Keywords: nondestructive testingpulsed eddy currentprobecrackdefect quantification Acknowledgements This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 50807053). The authors would like to thank Associate Professor Y. Li, of Xi'an Jiaotong University for valuable discussions.