Hall coefficient measurement for nondestructive materials characterization

Abstract

Although Hall detectors are widely used for magnetic flux density measurements in numerous electromagnetic NDE applications, measurement of the Hall coefficient of metals and their alloys for NDE purposes has not been successfully attempted before. While other intrinsic electric properties, such as electric conductivity and, to a lesser degree, thermoelectric power, are widely used for NDE, Hall coefficient measurements have never been really considered mainly because the measurements are rather difficult to carry out, especially in high-conductivity materials. In contrast to electric conductivity, the Hall coefficient is influenced mainly by the concentration density of the free charge carriers, i.e., electrons in metals, and not so much by their mobility, therefore it could be a valuable addition to our NDE arsenal. We modified the alternating current potential drop (ACPD) method with square-electrode configuration by adding an external bias magnetic field modulation to measure the Hall coefficient. The presence of such a bias field violates the Reciprocity Theorem unless the sign of the magnetic field is switched between the two measurements, which can be exploited to measure the Hall coefficient in the presence of other variations that would otherwise hide it. This new experimental method was tested on paramagnetic alloys and yielded a ±4% reproducibility that probably could be further improved by additional development efforts. As a first step towards illustrating some of the potential applications of this new technique, we have done reversible applied stress measurements in Al 1100 plates and found the sensitivity of the technique to elastic strain surprisingly high.