Sensors and Actuators A 101 (2002) 92–98

Design of a pulsed eddy current sensor for detection

of defects in aircraft lap-joints
Ali Sophiana, Gui Yun Tiana,*, David Taylora, John Rudlinb
a
School of Engineering, The University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield HD1 3DH, UK
b
Structural Integrity Department, TWI, Granta Park, Great Abington, Cambridge CB1 6AL, UK
Received 23 May 2002; accepted 31 May 2002

Abstract

This paper presents a new type of pulsed eddy current (PEC) sensor that has been designed for defect detection in aircraft lap-joint
structures. The sensor employs a new excitation circuit that requires no additional signal amplification and the paper also reports
compensation techniques that improve the sensing resolution and stability. A new hybrid feature of the peak value in time domain and
the maximum frequency magnitude in frequency domain has been investigated. A test rig has been built and some results from aircraft
samples are presented.
# 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Pulsed eddy current (PEC) sensor; Transient response; Magnetic sensor; Feature extraction; Digital compensation; Aircraft NDT

1. Introduction The constitutive equations in a nonmagnetic conductor are

given by
The detection and characterisation of sub-surface flaws in
conductive materials still pose major challenges to the NDE B ¼ m0 H (3)
community and pulsed eddy current (PEC) sensing has
emerged as one possible solution [1–3]. In contrast to J ¼ sE (4)
conventional sinusoidal eddy current technique, where the where m0 and s are the magnetic permeability of vacuum
excitation is limited to one frequency component, PEC and the electrical conductivity of a material sample. The
techniques excite the induction coil with a rectangular above equations are used to derive the governing equation
stimulus. This frequency rich stimulus has been shown to for eddy current sensing [5] and to model and design new
be particularly useful for detecting deeply hidden sub-sur- probes [6].
face defects [4]. It is widely understood that the penetration Throughout this development, computer modelling has
depth of an eddy current sensor depends on the excitation been used to understand the principles behind the technique
frequency, and consequently, PEC sensors are capable of [5] and to refine the methodology. The computer models
detecting both surface-breaking and buried defects. have also been used to design new probes, optimising their
Faraday’s law and the Ampere’s law are, respectively, size and shape, to allow a wide variety of physical situations
expressed as follows: to be tested [6].
The frequency components of a pulse waveform can be
r  E ¼ B (1) represented using Fourier series. If the excitation waveform
is defined as
rH ¼J (2)


Vmax nT  t < ðn þ GÞT; n ¼ 0; 1; 2; 3; . . .
f ðtÞ ¼
* 0 ðn þ GÞT  t < ðn þ 1ÞT; n ¼ 0; 1; 2; 3; . . .
Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44-1484-472319;
fax: þ44-1484-451883. (5)
E-mail addresses: A.sophian@hud.ac.uk (A. Sophian), g.y.tian@hud.ac.uk
(G.Y. Tian), d.taylor@hud.ac.uk (D. Taylor), John.rudlin@twi.co.uk The coil’s effective impedance is monitored, as it changes
(J. Rudlin). each time a defect is detected. In our approach the above

0924-4247/02/$ – see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 9 2 4 - 4 2 4 7 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 1 9 5 - 4
 A. Sophian et al. / Sensors and Actuators A 101 (2002) 92–98
pulsed voltage f(t) is applied to give the discrete time series.
The discrete Fourier transform Vk is then calculated:
X
N1
Vk ¼ vk eið2pkr=NÞ (6)
r¼0
By comparing the resulting frequency response it is
possible to detect the presence of defects. In analysing
the electromagnetic field distribution, three regions can be
identified as follows [7–9]: region 1 is the eddy current
region containing conducting, current carrying materials.
Region 2 contains nonconducting materials and region 3
contains nonconductive materials, which may be ferromag-
netic, but do not contain any source currents. This electro-
magnetic modelling and simulation, which is out of the
scope of this paper, has informed our sensor design and
sensor signal identification.
PEC systems have recently been developed for commer-
cial applications. For aircraft inspection, among others, two
distinguished works have been published by Lebrun et al.
and DERA. Lebrun et. al. [4] have developed a PEC system
and a technique which uses peak value, time to peak, and
characteristic frequency to detect defects under fasteners in
aircraft structures. The characteristic frequency is defined as
the frequency at which the highest magnitude spectrum of
the pulse response is seen. In this technique, both time and
frequency spectral analyses are used. They are able to detect
and locate 1:4 mm  1:5 mm defect at 5 mm under the
surface in AU4G structures with a coating layer. A centering
technique has also been developed and employed. DERA
has developed a PEC system called TRESCAN [5]. Rather
than using Bz (air) as reference, they use Bz on the defect-free
surface as reference and the time to the peak of the transient
is used to find the depth of the defect within the structure. A
two-dimensional image is obtained by scanning the probe
over the aircraft sample surface and information from
different depths is obtained by using the transient values
at a particular time point. Metal loss of 0.9 mm could be
detected at depths down to 7 mm and cracks of
6 mm  1:5 mm could be detected at a 6 mm depth. How-
ever, there are still some important technical and economic
issues to address in the PEC world.
It is the aim of this paper to develop a new simplified PEC
system with novel signal conditioning, which will detect and
characterise flaws under the surface of conductive materials
Fig. 1. System design.
93
by using advanced signal processing. The system block
diagram can be seen in Fig. 1. The rest of the paper is
organized as follows. Section 2 provides an introduction to
the new PEC sensor system, then Section 3 presents our
novel approach for signal compensation. Section 4 illus-
trates the use of the proposed techniques in aircraft NDT and
the paper concludes with a brief discussion in Section 5.
2. A new PEC system
2.1. System design
The new PEC system consists of a waveform generator, a
coil driver, a probe, an A/D capture card and a PC with signal
processing software and display as shown in Fig. 1.
The waveform generator outputs rectangular signals of
variable frequency and duty cycle. The waveform is fed to a
coil driver circuit, which excites the induction coil in the
probe. The pick-up sensors measure the effective magnetic
field, which consists of the one generated by the excitation
coil and the one generated by the induced eddy current in the
sample. An A/D card converts this signal into digital data
ready to be processed by software in the PC, which includes
data acquisition, feature extraction and defect detection.
Finally the results are displayed on the monitor for inter-
pretation by the user.
2.2. Excitation circuit design
The important parameters in the excitation are the asymp-
totic value of the current and the rate of change of the rising
edge. The larger the current, the larger the generated mag-
netic field will be and hence, the resulting eddy current in the
specimen. This will increase the sensitivity and the signal to
noise ratio. However, a current that is too large can cause
local heating and easily introduce temperature drift into the
system. The experiment reported in this paper has used a
peak current of 300 mA.
The rate of change of the rising edge of the current pulse is
crucial as it determines the frequency components contained
in the excitation. The higher the rate of change, the more
high frequency components generated and hence, more
diagnostic information can be expected. It is also important
to stabilise the excitation voltage or current sources for a
94 A. Sophian et al. / Sensors and Actuators A 101 (2002) 92–98
wide range of measurement objects and for various mea-
surement conditions such as lift-up, target inhomogeniety
and surface geometrical effects [10]. In this system, software
compensation techniques, described in Section 3, are used.
Our new simplified excitation circuit uses a pair of
MOSFETs as a switch that is turned on and off by the
generator. The supply voltage is variable in order to be able
to control the peak excitation current.
2.3. Sensor probe design
The sensor probe consists of an inductive flat coil and a
magnetic field sensor. The coil is used to generate the
varying magnetic field, and the magnetic field sensor to
pick-up the perturbed magnetic field.
The design of the coil is adapted to the particular applica-
tion. It determines the depth of penetration and the spatial
resolution. Smaller diameter and longer length is suitable for
applications that demand high spatial resolution with sacri-
ficed penetration depth.
Several types of magnetic sensor are available for sensing
the resulting magnetic field strength including Hall effect
devices, anisotropic magnetoresistive and giant magnetoresi-
sitve (GMR) devices. These sensors perform better than pick-
up coils for sub-surface defect detection, as they are more
sensitive to low frequencies. From the three types of sensor that
we have used, the Hall effect device has been shown to possess
a much wider magnetic field range and the anisotropic mag-
netoresistive device has the smallest range. The sensitive layer
of the device lays parallel to the surface of the testing sample
and measures the magnetic field in a direction perpendicular to
the surface. The sensor structure is shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 3. Sensor responses and coil currents.
Fig. 2. Sensor probe structure.
3. Signal compensation and feature extraction
A 20 MHz analogue to digital conversion PCI card has been
used in the data acquisition. Importantly, the requirement to
amplify the response signal has been negated, which saves
some cost and complexity. The digitised output data is captured
and ready for advanced signal analysis and diagnosis. To
minimise the noise generated at the output, averaging of
multisamples for consecutive cycles and a low-pass Gaussian
filters are applied. The averaging is carried out on 10 con-
secutive responses, before the application of the Gaussian filter,
which reduces spurious noise in the signal and smoothes it.
For the signal analysis we use the response signal when the
probe is in air as a reference, rather than a defect-free sample,
in order to get differential signals with higher signal to noise
ratios. A differential signal is generated by subtracting
the response signal when the probe is on the specimen from
the reference signal. The peak value of the differential and
its time of arrival are used to characterise defect features.
In the measurement system, the repeatability of the excitation
current is crucial, as it will determine the magnetic field
that induces the eddy current in the sample. However, the
 A. Sophian et al. / Sensors and Actuators A 101 (2002) 92–98 95

Fig. 4. Compensated differential response signals.

inductance of the coil will be subject to variations due to lift-
off, target material properties and structure. This change in
inductance will lead to a change in the excitation current and a
compensation technique is required.
To design and evaluate a compensation technique, the
sensor has been used to test different some layered samples,
where each layer comprises a 1.5 mm Al plate. If fair is the
response in air, fn is the response of an n-layered sample, cair
is the coil current in the air, and cn is the coil current for an n-
layered sample, the differential signals can be calculated by
dn ¼ fn  fair (7)
dcn ¼ cn  cair (8)
GðxÞ ¼ x  G (9)
where G is a Gaussian filter function and x is the discrete
response data; n will be in the range of 1–5.
Fig. 3 illustrates some test sample differential signals,
where the upper diagram is the differential response from the
Hall effect device and the lower is the current variation in the
excitation coil. As indicated in the Fig. 3, different samples
have different response, where the coil current is varied. In
contrast to the blind signal separation and compensation
approach [11], we apply simple linear compensation algo-
rithms for real time measurement:
compn ¼ Gðdn Þ þ KGðdcn Þ (10)
where K maximises the measured feature differences
between different samples by compensating for current
change. By optimisation the discrimination and the stability
of the defect detection, the recommendation for K is 1.5,
where a local maxima point is obtained by least mean square
(LMS) algorithms. Fig. 4 illustrates the compensated sig-
nals, where the differences in peak values have been max-
imised. In other words, the compensation has increased
measurement resolution and stability.
As indicated in Fig. 4, different thickness of Al samples
will affect the features of the compensated differential

Fig. 5. Aircraft lap-joint sample.

96 A. Sophian et al. / Sensors and Actuators A 101 (2002) 92–98

Fig. 6. (a) Model of surface defect and (b) sub-surface defect in second layer.

signals from the sensor. These changes will include the peak
value and the signature of the signals. Therefore, by obser-
ving these two quantities, we can obtain some information
about the specimen.
Peak values in the time domain can provide simple
information about defects. However, they are sensitive to
noise and a single parameter is not good enough to quantify
complex cracks. A new feature extraction technique has,
therefore, been devised. In addition to the peak value feature,
the technique employs spectral analysis using the fast Four-
ier transform (FFT). To improve discrimination between
surface and sub-surface defects, two frequency components
have been selected. As widely understood in eddy current
NDT, low frequency components are suitable for deep
penetration and hence, detection of deeply buried defects,
and high frequency components are suitable for surface

Fig. 7. Scanning result of second row.

 A. Sophian et al. / Sensors and Actuators A 101 (2002) 92–98
breaking defects. Following this principle and some experi-
ments, the two selected frequencies are the fundamental
frequency, which always has the maximum magnitude and a
frequency component around 10 kHz. However, this pair of
components should be adjusted to the sample to be tested.
By integrating these new features in the frequency domain
and the peak values in time domain, we can obtain com-
prehensive information about any cracks.
Section 4 will report the application of this sensor and
compensation techniques to the testing of industrial samples.
4. Preliminary tests and analysis
4.1. Aircraft lap-joint specimen
A preliminary test was carried out in order to evaluate these
techniques. Two plates of aluminium were joined together
using rivets to simulate aircraft lap-joint structures. Slots were
manufactured on the top side of the top plate and on the
bottom side of the bottom plate. The surface and sub-surface
defects are illustrated in Fig. 5 with the thick lines inside the
illustration representing surface defects and the thin lines
representing sub-surface defects. The details of the surface
and sub-surface defects under the rivets can be seen in Fig. 6.
4.2. Scanning testing
Whilst using these discriminating features of the peak
value and the maximum frequency magnitude for the aircraft
lap-joint samples, a scanning technique was employed. Fig. 7
shows the result of scanning the rows of rivets. From top to
bottom, the graphs in the figure show peak value, maximum
frequency component magnitude, and the magnitude of
frequency component around 10 kHz. The graphs show that
the surface defects with length of 10 mm or greater are
detected as indicated by high peak values and fundamental
magnitudes. Some shorter defects are also detected. The
magnitudes of both features, in addition, provide indication
of the length of the defects. By comparison of frequency
magnitude distribution along frequencies, sub-surface/sur-
face will be detected. Further work on the extraction of depth
information for sub-surface crack is under-investigation.
The results show that the low frequency component high-
lights the sub-surface defects better than the peak value
whilst the high frequency component highlights the surface
defects and not the sub-surface ones. This is useful for the
discrimination and classification of types of defects and
automatic classification and pattern signature extraction
are current areas of work.
5. Conclusions and further work
The paper has reported a simple PEC system for sur-
face and sub-surface crack detection. Uniquely, the system
97
presented in the paper requires no amplification circuitry
and uses pure undistorted data. The software compensation
techniques employed have improved the measurement reso-
lution and stability. The initial results show that the current
system is capable of detecting surface and sub-surface
defects using hybrid features. By integration of both time
and frequency domain analyses, the new feature extraction
techniques achieve good discrimination of defects by their
location and are less prone to noise. Further work attempt-
ing to quantify three-dimensional shape of the defects is
ongoing.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank TWI Ltd. for their
financial support and samples. The authors thank Mr. W.
Hussain for his contribution to the work.
References
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Biographies
Ali Sophian obtained his BEng in electronic and information engineering
at the University of Huddersfield in 1998. Currently, he is pursuing his
PhD in the area of pulsed eddy current NDT at the same university. His
research interest includes eddy current NDT and digital signal processing.
Gui Yun Tian obtained his BSc in metrology and instrumentation and MSc
in precision engineering at the University of Sichuan (Chengdu, PR China)
98 A. Sophian et al. / Sensors and Actuators A 101 (2002) 92–98
in 1985 and 1988, respectively. After working in the University of Sichuan
for several years as a member of the academic staff, he was awarded his
degree at the University of Derby, UK in 1998. Currently, he is a senior
lecturer in engineering at the School of Engineering, University of
Huddersfield. Dr Tian has joint background in engineering and computer
science. His research interests are broadly in the areas of sensor and
instrumentation, signal processing, computer vision and graphics.
David Taylor obtained his BSc in electronic and electrical engineering
from Huddersfield Polytechnic, UK, in 1983 as a scholarship student from
the NCB. After working in the mining industry for several years he
returned to academia and was awarded a PhD in 1990 for research into IC
testing strategies. Currently, he is a professor in the School of Engineering,
University of Huddersfield and leads the Electronics and Communications
Research Group, working primarily in transient testing of analogue ICs
and sensors.
John Rudlin is principal consultant NDT in Structural Integrity Depart-
ment, The Welding Institute (TWI). After serving in the University College
of London, now he works in industrial applications of NDE in TWI.