Development of a resonant repeater tag for the enhancement of sensitivity and specificity in a wireless eddy current sensing scheme

Eddy current sensing has been successfully used in various applications from testing heat exchange tubes for nuclear power plants to assessing dielectric thickness on printed circuit boards. However, in civil infrastructures cosmetic or cementitious surface material often keeps the probe or reader coil from accessing conductive medium inside the structure, resulting in reduced coupling as the distance increases between the DUT (device under test) and probe. Thus, the direct application of existing eddy current sensing technique is not very useful to detect flaws in civil infrastructures. To address this weak coupling problem, a simple scheme is proposed in which a resonant passive repeater tag is placed between the reader coil and the conducting test target. In this paper, the feasibility of detecting defects like cracks or fractures in conductive medium using a passive resonant tag and remote inductive pick-up as a method of interrogation is shown. Experimental data taken from simple setups to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed scheme are presented.