A low-cost flexible instrument made of off-the-shelf components for pulsed eddy current testing: overview and application to pseudo-noise excitation

A flexible and low-cost device for eddy current non-destructive testing made of off-the-shelf components is described. The proposed system is compact and easy to operate, and it consists of a dual H-bridge stepper motor driver, a coil winded in-house on an additively manufactured support, a tunnel magnetoresistance sensor, and a data generation/acquisition module. For the latter, two different commercial devices have been used, and both setups have been then tested on a benchmark sample to detect small artificial cracks. The system can flexibly generate square pulse or square wave with tunable duration and frequency, as well as pseudo-noise binary waveforms that are here used in combination with pulse-compression to increase the inspection sensitivity with respect to standard pulsed eddy current testing. A benchmark sample was analysed, and all the defects were correctly located, demonstrating the good detection capability of the sensor. This was achieved by assembling a very low-cost handy device, which can be further improved in portability and performances with the use of different off-the-shelf components, and that can be easily integrated with single-board PC, paving the way for future developments in this field.