Abstract
Electromagnetic wave techniques have been used extensively for materials characterization. Microwaves have been used for the measurement of degree of cure in composite materials, eddy current methods have been used for the detection of surface breaking cracks in metal alloys and radio waves have been used as a probe of the earth’s crust. For techniques that use propagating waves, there are actually three modes for electromagnetic wave transmission from the source to the receiver: direct waves, reflected waves and lateral waves (also known as surface waves). An interesting characteristic of lateral waves is that they propagate along the boundary between two different materials with the interaction being confined to the boundary region. In this work, the use of lateral waves for remote and noncontacting sensing is considered with an emphasis on characterization of metallic surfaces. The interaction of these waves with near surface microstructural features such as cracks, voids and inclusions is considered showing that lateral waves can be used to detect these features using microwave-based techniques. While the lateral field strength is small compared to other modes, it is shown that this field is sufficiently large to be useful for crack detection purposes. Experiments on stainless steel plates with slit type defects show model system results for the detection of surface breaking defects using this lateral wave method.
Published Version
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