A Modification of Magnetic Adaptive Testing: Progressive Method for Nondestructive Inspection of Microstructural Changes in Ferromagnetic Constructional Materials

Magnetic adaptive testing (MAT), thanks to its relative simplicity from the point of view of both hardware and software, appears to be very promising for non-destructive analysis of various ferromagnetic constructional materials used in many industrial applications. In order to make the inspection of tested objects faster, even more straightforward and the processing of data easier, we concentrated our effort both to improve the experimental procedure, based on specific way of the measurement of magnetization curves at piece-wise linear (triangular) exciting field with a constant field rate of change (i.e., slope) as well as to create a universal software tool for MAT data analysis. On contrary to the original implementation of MAT, the hysteresis loops are measured with decreasing maximum field values, starting at sample saturation region; therefore, time consuming sample demagnetization can be skipped completely. In addition, an advanced tool for the processing of experimentally obtained magnetization curves is presented. Using this application allows to find proper non-traditional magnetic parameters (e.g., the differential permeability) being the most sensitive to various types of industrial load (e.g., thermal, mechanical and/or neutron irradiation) and, at the same time, sufficiently correlated with other, traditional magnetic as well as non-magnetic parameters used routinely for the assessment of possible structural changes associated with applied, often long-term, load even on a microscopic scale, prior to any damage manifests on a macroscopic, visible level. The software capabilities were demonstrated on the data representing the material, whose response to acting thermal load is being difficult to analyze, since the dependence of observed parameters (differential permeability) upon defined artificial ageing was rather complicated. Nevertheless, the sensitivity of differential permeability to such a load was found being more than 8 times larger than in case of traditional hysteretic parameter, namely the remanent flux density while the correlation between them was high.