Design of A Multifunctional Micro-Magnetic Testing Instrument

Abstract

Micro-magnetic testing technology is capable of non-destructively evaluating the mechanical properties and residual stress in ferromagnetic components. In the applications of micro-magnetic testing technology, several types of magnetic signals, such as magnetic Barkhausen noise, incremental permeability, tangential magnetic field and eddy current, etc., are used to characterize the target properties (mechanical properties and residual stress). In this paper, a unique framework for multifunctional micro-magnetic sensor design is proposed. Accordingly, a multifunctional micro-magnetic instrument is developed. Intermittently superimposed magnetic fields of high (several kHz) and low frequencies (several Hz) are used for material magnetization. Combined magnetic sensors are employed to measure a total of five types of signals, including the magnetic Barkhausen noise, incremental permeability, eddy currents, tangential magnetic field and main flux. Especially, twisted-pair wiring was used for winding two identical sensing coils. One of the sensing coils is used for eddy current or incremental permeability detection and the rest one acts as a compensatory coil to suppress the strong mutual induction voltage in detection coil. The entire instrument is composed of a multi-channel signal generator, a power amplifier, signal processing circuits embedded into the multifunctional sensor and a four-channel signal acquisition device. The multi-channel signal generator is constructed based on FPGA and high speed D/A converters. The direct digital synthesizer and state machine are programed in FPGA to enable the excitation of intermittently superimposed signals of high and low frequencies. Carefully experiments were performed to test the performances of the developed instrument. The results obtained from different types of steels proved that the developed instrument can acquire five types of magnetic signals with high SNR. The features of the five types of magnetic signals can used to distinguish the material and its mechanical properties such as surface hardness.