Model-based cylinder radius and permeability estimation using eddy current testing

Abstract

The material quality of metallic cylinders including microstructure is reflected in their physical properties. Eddy current testing techniques play an important role in the measurement of metallic cylinder measurement. In this paper, a cylinder radius and permeability estimation method is proposed based on the combined analytical and optimisation method. The Dodd and Deeds analytical model has been first simplified, which suggests an approximate linear relationship between the cylinder radius, permeability and coil inductance. Based on the proposed relation, the pre-estimated radius and permeability are used as the initial guess for the modified Newton–Raphson algorithm to solve the least squares problem between the measured and calculated coil inductance spectra. This method avoids the local minimum issue that occurs otherwise, to some extent. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been evaluated by numerical simulations and experiments, which indicates that fast estimation can be achieved with high accuracy.