Lamb Wave Inspection for Crack Detection in Coil Spring of Automobile Suspension System

자동차 현가 장치용 스프링의 신뢰성 평가를 위한 Lamb Wave 크랙검사

Suspension system is one of the most important components indespensible for stability and reliability of automobiles. The demands to more safe and durable suspension system have been increased as the automobiles get popular and improve in quality. The crack in the coil spring of the suspension system produced during manufacturing may grow under a fatigue load and cause a severe safety problems which lead to a catastrophic damage to the passengers. Many conventional NDT techniques including ET, RT, and UT are less sensitive or hard to apply to detect the surface breaking crack in the suspension coils partly because the techniques are point-to-point measurement methods, thus take too long time to inspect the coil spring longer than 1m. Contrary to this, Lamb wave technique is full-field measurement method that make it possible to examine the whole coil spring in real time. In this paper, the Lamb wave is applied to the coil spring to investigate the possibility to detect the cracks on the surface of the coil spring.