4 - Physical Principles of Measurements with EMAT Transducers

Periodic permanent magnet electromagnetic acoustic transducers (PPM EMATs) effectively generate shear horizontal (SH) ultrasonic guided waves in metallic media. Depending on their construction parameters, PPM EMATs can generate ultrasonic waves towards unwanted directions, due to the presence of side lobes in their radiation pattern. In this paper, a new PPM-like EMAT is proposed with the objective of reducing the side-lobe level in the radiation pattern of PPM EMATs. This was achieved by altering the magnets’ dimension in the PPM array following a diamond-like shape, reducing their width as one gets further from the centre of the transducer. The radiation behaviour of the EMAT was evaluated by means of an apodization factor, defined as the aperture reduction ratio. The side-lobe level showed a maximum reduction for an apodization factor of approximately 2. Four different configurations of the new PPM-like EMAT design and two reference conventional PPM EMATs were fabricated and experimentally evaluated on an aluminium plate. Experimental radiation patterns were compared to analytical model results showing good agreement. Relative to the conventional PPM EMAT, the new apodized diamond-shaped PPM EMAT presented a side lobe suppression of up to approximately 8 dB.

The early work on long range guided wave nondestructive testing (NDT) was largely done in industry, and multiple applications were developed before a surge in academic interest starting in the early 1990s. This paper reviews the history of the field, covering the topics that must be addressed in the design of a test procedure, as well as applications in both NDT and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). The use of guided waves in long range NDT is relatively mature, and largely limited to simple structures in applications that are difficult or impossible to address by conventional point inspection methods. Point methods are impractical in most large area SHM applications where it is necessary to detect isolated defects since it is not possible to cover the whole area of interest with transducers. Guided waves therefore have great potential in SHM as they enable a large area of structure to be monitored from a limited number of transduction locations, so reducing the added weight, cost and complexity of the attachment to the structure. It is also possible to improve the sensitivity of the test relative to that obtained in one-off inspection by monitoring the change in signals with time using baseline subtraction. Current SHM deployments are largely in the same types of structure as those where guided wave NDT is used, but there is substantial potential for increasing the range of applications. The paper concludes with a review of the research and development needs for this potential to be realised.

The present paper deals with the problem of elastic wave generation mechanisms (WGMs) by an electromagnetic-acoustic transducer (EMAT) in ferromagnetic materials. The paper seeks to prove that taking into account all the WGMs must be a general rule to quantitatively predict the elastic waves generated by an EMAT in such materials. Existing models of the various physical phenomena involved, namely magnetic and magnetostrictive, electromagnetic, and ultrasonic, are combined to solve the multiphysics wave generation problem. The resulting model shows that WGMs (i.e., electromagnetic force, magnetostrictive strain, and magnetic traction) strongly depend on material properties and EMAT design and excitation. To illustrate this, four magnetic materials (nickel, AISI410, Z20C13, and low carbon steel) with similar elastic but contrasting electromagnetic properties are studied. A given EMAT of fixed excitation and geometry yields WGMs with highly different amplitudes in these materials, with a WGM dominant in one material being negligible in another. Experimental results make it possible to validate the accuracy of certain predictions of the model developed. In summary, the present work shows that considering all WGMs is the general rule when working with ferromagnetic materials. Furthermore, it offers a generic model that can be integrated into various numerical tools to help optimize EMAT design and give reliable data interpretation.

Defects in the rails can affect the operational safety of the railway. In order to examine the knowledge structure of the research about the ultrasonic testing of rail defects, a systematic discussion of the research on the detection of rail defects by ultrasonic technology is conducted. Three development stages in the field of ultrasonic detection of rail defects were revealed using main path analysis, and the themes of five current research hotspots in the field were clarified. These analyses were done for the 371 academic publications published between 1992 and 2022 using bibliometric methods. The most influential nations, academic institutions, and academic journals in the field today are introduced using the visualization technique. Previously, no review articles using the bibliometric method in the field of ultrasonic detection of rail defects had been published. The development direction and research suggestions for ultrasonic detection of rail defects are presented based on the study's findings.

Array transducers can allow wavelength and frequency selectivity and can be used to generate different types of waves, such as ultrasonic bulk or guided waves. Dual-array transducers consist of two interlaced arrays, where the elements of each array are electrically connected. Therefore, by driving each array with a pair of phased pulses one can achieve a degree of wave generation control that allows unidirectional generation, unlike single array transducers that generate waves in both 0° and 180° directions with respect to the array’s longitudinal axis. In this paper, we present a one-dimensional analytical model to determine the ultrasonic waves generated by dual-array transducers based on the excitability of the array in the frequency–wavenumber domain, the so-called operation region, determined by the joint spatial and temporal spectrum of the dual-array. We further exploited it to analyse the effectiveness of unidirectional generation with time-delayed excitation signals that provide ideal constructive or destructive interferences. The model also provides the time-domain received waveforms, which were compared to experimentally generated shear-horizontal ultrasonic guided waves, with a dual periodic permanent magnet array electromagnetic acoustic transducer, showing very good agreement. The adequate selection of the excitation signal allowed one to obtain up to about 40 dB unidirectionality experimentally.

A technique is presented for determining elastic nonlinearity of materials from resonant frequency shifts as a function of signal amplitude during free vibrational decay after tone-burst excitation. The technique differs from previous nonlinear reverberation spectroscopy (NRS) techniques in that it employs phase-sensitive superheterodyne reception. Time-dependent amplitudes of in-phase and out-of-phase components of signals, relative to a reference sinusoid at the excitation frequency, are provided through analog hardware processing in the absence of digitization of the signal from the vibrational sensor. The time-dependent phase and amplitude of the signal are determined through software analysis of these in-phase and out-of-phase components, and the instantaneous frequency during free decay is then determined from the time derivative of the phase. With this approach, superheterodyne reception and low-pass filtering of the phase-detector outputs lead to a great reduction in noise and computation effort, relative to direct digitization and software processing of the sensor signal, while retaining information on frequency shifts on a relevant time scale during ringdown. As with other NRS techniques, rapid acquisition of data on amplitude dependence of the resonant frequency during ringdown leads to minimization of systematic errors from temperature drift. The technique is demonstrated with noncontacting electromagnetic-acoustic transduction on custom alloyed Al (0.2 at.% Zn) and commercial Al 7075 cylinders with axial-shear resonant frequencies between 658 kHz and 659 kHz. The precision of measurements of relative frequency shifts is found to be on the order of 0.1 parts per million (ppm), exceeding by two orders of magnitude the best reported precision of nonlinear resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (NRUS).