Magnetic flux leakage–based local damage detection and quantification for steel wire rope non-destructive evaluation

A magnetic flux leakage method was applied to detect damage when inspecting steel wire rope. A multi-channel magnetic flux leakage sensor head was fabricated using Hall sensors and permanent magnets to adapt to the wire rope. Three types of artificial damage were created on a wire rope specimen. The magnetic flux leakage sensor head scanned the damaged specimen to measure the magnetic flux density while the damage was expanding in three steps. Signal processing processes including the enveloping process based on Hilbert transform were performed to clarify the flux leakage signal due to the damage. The enveloped signals were then analyzed for objective damage detection by comparing with the threshold value. For improvement of quantitative analysis, three types of new damage indexes that utilize the relationship between the enveloped magnetic flux leakage signal and the threshold value were additionally proposed. By using the proposed damage indexes and the general damage indexes for the magnetic flux leakage method, the detected magnetic flux leakage signals from each damage type were quantified. The trends of the extracted damage indexes according to damage levels were analyzed to examine the applicability and reliability of the proposed damage indexes for the magnetic flux leakage based wire rope inspection.