Abstract
The equivalent circuit model of pulsed eddy current testing (PECT) has simple mathematics but its applications are limited to qualitative analysis such as principle illustration and signal interpretation. In this paper, the parameters of equivalent circuit model are estimated using system identification method and quantitative relationships are found between some of the parameters and the size of the defect. The equivalent circuit equations were solved from the perspective of system analysis to yield the system transfer function. An
Keywords
Introduction
The pulsed eddy current testing (PECT), which utilizes a repetitive broadband pulse as its excitation, has gained much attention in the family of eddy current testing (ECT) for decades due to its notable characteristics such as deep penetration in the conductive specimen, diverse time-domain signal features and simple electronics for instrumentation. 1 Originally developed for measuring the thickness of zirconium coating on nuclear fuel elements, 2 this technique has been extensively used for defect inspection and evaluation, thickness measurement and conductivity characterization.3–6 By now, PECT instruments have achieved wide applications in the inspection of cracks in multilayer aircraft structure7,8 and corrosion under insulation.9,10
Along with the development of application, the modelling approach has also been investigated because it not only helps understand the underlying physical process but also can be used to fast simulate and predict the probe responses without performing toilsome practical inspections, thus providing guidance for the selection of inspection parameters and the design of a probe. Analytical modelling, which is based on the Maxwell’s equations, has the most rigorous derivation and is of great theoretical importance. Almost all present ECT analytical models are originated from the classical model made by Dodd and Deeds 11 who derived closed-form integral solutions in the late 1960’s for a coil above a layered conducting half space as well as a coil surrounding an infinitely long conducting rod. For PECT modelling, the algorithms of Laplace transform (LT) and inverse LT (ILT) or Fourier transform (FT) and inverse FT (IFT) were adopted to bridge the transient excitation/response and the harmonic excitation/response.12,13 Although a lot of studies were reported in the literature, for now, analytical modelling is still restricted to the cases of simple tests geometries and regular shaped defects. Numerical modelling which employs discretization of the solution domain and numerical integration turns out to be a complement to the analytical modelling. With the fast development in computer technology, one can tackle PECT problems with arbitrary shaped defects and specimen geometries by using commercially available numerical simulation software. 14
Another modelling approach, known as the equivalent circuit model or the transformer model, regards the interaction between the probe and the specimen as a transformer. The probe and the specimen are respectively modelled as the primary and the secondary windings, both consisting of a resistance in series with an inductance, and their coupling is described by a mutual inductance. The equations of the equivalent transformer circuit can be established by using Kirchhoff’s voltage law, but how to obtain the unknown parameters involved in the equations becomes the key part of the modelling. Lefebvre et al. 15 used the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm to curve-fit PECT signals to the equivalent circuit model. Their study showed that choosing adequate initial guess values of model parameters is crucial for solution converging and getting an excellent fit. Vyroubal 16 presented a new transformer model with single primary and multiple secondary windings to calculate the impedance of the eddy-current displacement probe. By dividing the specimen’s eddy current circulation paths into a sufficient number of single-turn rings, good agreement was achieved between the modelled and the measured probe responses.
From the perspective of system analysis, the PECT signal can be regarded as an impulse response of the PECT system. Hence, transfer function as well as system identification were also used to characterize the PECT system. Tondo et al. 17 deduced the transfer function representing the admittance of the probe coil from the equivalent circuit. Then an inductive time constant was obtained from the transfer function parameters and explored as a new feature to assess the size of slots fabricated on a metal sample. Preliminary analysis showed that the inductive time constant is more sensitive than the traditionally used reflected impedance. Dadić et al. 18 proposed a z-domain, finite impulse response (FIR) model along with the least mean squares (LMS) algorithm to identify the response of the PECT system. Lang et al. 19 applied the system identification method to establish the transfer function model of PECT systems. The transfer model was considered to be of second order and the identified model parameters were processed by Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA) to classify defect patterns. In a different way, Lee et al.20,21 determined the PECT system transfer function between the probe terminal and the instrument readout, so as to deduct instrument dependence from the experimental waveform and thus make the converted waveform comparable to model-predicted or benchmark waveforms.
All in all, compared with analytical modelling, equivalent circuit model or transfer function based model doesn’t involve complex mathematics, but the model parameters were not thoroughly studied in the application of defect evaluation. This paper is concerned with the parameter identification of equivalent circuit model and exploration of new features from identified parameters for pulsed eddy current nondestructive evaluation.
Equivalent circuit modelling
The equivalent circuit modelling is to equate the electromagnetic phenomenon and process as a circuit composed of ideal power sources and circuit elements, and thus conduct circuit analysis instead of field analysis. The working frequency of a typical PECT system is from a few Hz to kHz which belongs to the low frequency regime. This means that the system dimension can be considered as electrically small when compared to the excitation wavelength. Therefore, the electromagnetic coupling between the PECT probe and the specimen can be simplified to a lumped-parameter transformer, as shown in Figure 1. The primary and secondary windings of the transformer represent the probe coil and the specimen under test, respectively. The lumped parameters

(a) Schematic of PECT and (b) its equivalent circuit model.
The mutual inductance
where
The coupling factor
Applying Kirchhoff’s voltage law to the equivalent circuit shown in Figure 1(b) yields
Upon applying Laplace transform to both sides of equation (2) and performing some simple algebraic transformations, the relationship between the current and the applied voltage in the primary circuit is obtained
where
Given that the current
where the parameters
Equation (4) indicates that the PECT system can be described by a second order system. The corresponding parameters in equation (5), which are related to
It should be mentioned that there are usually two types of probes, viz., the absolute probe and the transmitter-receiver (TR) probe, used in practical PECT systems.22,23 The absolute probe only has a single coil and thus matches with the above equivalent circuit model and the corresponding transfer function. However, for the TR probe which utilizes one coil to transmit the primary magnetic field and the other coil to receive the secondary magnetic field, the presented model need to be modified to take into account the coupling between the transmitter and the receiver.
System identification
System identification is a widely used technique in control engineering to characterize an unknown system when its inputs and outputs are given or can be measured. The essence of system identification is to select a model structure that fits the observed input-output data according to a given criterion.24–26
Equation (4) gives the model structure but the parameters
It is a consensus that the advantages of PECT over traditional ECT stems from its square-wave excitation which provides rich frequency components. However, a periodic square wave has a discrete spectrum and its amplitude descends as the frequency component gets higher. Figure 2(a) and (b) gives such an example, a 10 Hz square wave of 10 periods and its frequency spectrum obtained by FFT. It is evident that the amplitude of harmonic component decays fast with the increase of frequency. The

Comparison of waveforms and spectrums of the square wave and the
Since the input and output data collected in the experiment are discrete in time domain, the transfer function model should also be represented in the discrete-time form, and thus equation (4) is equivalent to 27
where
Considering the actual output signal always contains noises, then the discrete transfer function model further becomes 28
where
Once the discrete-time model is estimated, it can be converted to the continuous-time model described by equation (4) using the zero-order hold (ZOH).27,29
With the help of MATLAB System Identification Toolbox, 29 the identification process described above can be fast implemented. In the System Identification app, the imported experiment input-output data are processed and examined based on the selected model structure, here the transfer function models. The estimation of model parameters can be done within a short time and the value of best fits which represents the confidence of estimation will also be given.
Calculation of model parameters
Calculation of M
Through the above identification, parameters of
The probe coil is a cylindrical multi-turn coreless coil. If the Joule heat is neglected, the energy stored by the coil is equal to the work needed to produce a current through the coil. The formula for this energy is given as
where
In large class of materials, there exists a linear constitutive relationship between the magnetic flux density
where the integral is evaluated over the entire region where the magnetic field exists.
Combining equations (9) and (10) yields
The magnetic flux generated by the probe coil partly penetrates into the specimen while the rest only residents in the air, as the red and black flux lines illustrated in Figure 3. The former part contributes to the formation of mutual inductance
where

Illustration of magnetic field interaction between probe coil and specimen.
However, it is not practical to factor out
For a given specimen, the maximum area involved in the probe-to-specimen interaction is the specimen’s upper surface. During 3D simulation, the data of the magnetic flux density
where
Calculation of Ri and Li
Figure 4 shows the procedure of determining equivalent circuit model parameters

Procedure of obtaining the equivalent circuit model parameters.
Figure 5 shows the waveforms of the probe input and output signals. The input

Waveforms of the probe: (a) input and (b) output signals.
On condition that
Application to defect evaluation
In this section, preliminary PECT experiments are carried out on two defected specimens and the experiment data are processed through the procedure presented in Figure 4. The identified
Figure 6 depicts the probe and specimens used in experiments. A coreless cylindrical coil is used as the probe coil and its geometric parameters are listed in Table 1. Two slabs made of aluminium alloy 6061 are used as the specimens. Specimen #1 is 10 mm thick and machined with five through-slots with the same depth of 5 mm but different widths of 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 mm, labelled by S1 to S5 respectively. Specimen #2 is 16 mm thick and fabricated with five slots with the same width of 2 mm but different depths of 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 mm, labelled by S’1 to S’5 respectively. The probe coil is excited with an

Photo of the probe and specimens.
Probe coil parameters.
During experiments, the probe is manually held on the specimen with the coil centre aimed at the slot. The defect-free region of the specimen is also tested as a reference. Table 2 gives the identified transfer function parameters based on acquired experiment data while Table 3 shows the estimate of equivalent circuit model parameters. For a group of input-output data with the duration of 1 s and sampling rate of 100 kS/s, the time consumed in the identification process was about 26.9 s, using a computer equipped with a processor of Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 and a RAM of 8 GB. Although all the identified
Identified transfer function model parameters.
Estimate of equivalent circuit model parameters.
Figures 7 and 8 plot the variations of

Plots of normalized

Plots of normalized
Conclusion
PECT equivalent circuit model has relatively simple mathematical expressions but usually serves as a tool in textbooks for qualitative interpretation of the PECT principle. This paper concerns the estimate of equivalent circuit model parameters and touches on the application of model parameters in aspect of defect evaluation. By regarding the probe-to-specimen interaction as a mutual inductance, the probe and specimen are respectively modelled as the primary and secondary windings of a transformer. The transformer circuit equations are tackled from the perspective of system analysis and the transfer function is formulated in Laplace domain. To determine the transfer function parameters, system identification approach was applied. The
The mutual inductance between the probe coil and the specimen is calculated using a novel method based on the magnetic field energy allocated to the probe-to-specimen coupling. Other equivalent circuit parameters including resistance and self-inductance are estimated based on the identified transfer function parameters. It is found that the resistance and self-inductance of the secondary windings decrease greatly and monotonically as the slot size (width or depth) increases. The self-inductance is more sensitive to the variation of slot size than the resistance. Both of them have the potential to serve as the signal feature for defect evaluation.
Compared with conventional PECT signal features such as peak value, time to peak and time-to-zero crossing, the features extracted from estimated parameters are thought to be more robust to the effects of noise and measurement errors because most system identification methods are capable of dealing with noise and measurement errors. However, the parameter identification also introduces an extra step for PECT signal processing, which makes the detection speed slow down in the practical application. Thus, the future work will focus on optimizing the computation speed using advanced algorithms for the identification of transfer function parameters.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 51505406.
