• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.427-435
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• 2009

Cylindrical structures such as pipes and shafts are widely used in various industrial facilities. Recently, researches on magnetostrictive transduction of torsional waves have been actively reported for the nondestructive evaluation of those cylindrical structures. However, the existing magnetostrictive patch transducer has somewhat inconvenient and time.consuming process like patch bonding to a structure since it should employ a magnetostrictive patch having strong magnetostriction. To overcome these limitations of the existing transducer, in this work, we develop a novel modular magnetostrictive transducer to generate and measure torsional waves to inspect a cylindrical structure. The proposed transducer can be applied as viscous liquid coupling with shear couplant or dry coupling without coupling media instead of patch bonding to a structure. We describe a detailed structure of the modular transducer and conduct some experiments to verify its performance.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.122-129
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• 2009

Recently much attention has been paid to a guided wave due to its effective applicability to long range and fast inspection of structures. In guided wave based NDE, the appropriate selection of wave modes is one of important factors since the test performance is highly dependent on which mode of guided waves is employed. As far as plate-like structures are concerned, so far, SH guided wave has not been frequently applied compared to Lamb waves, which is mostly caused by the lack of proper and convenient transducers to generate and measure the SH waves. In this investigation, a new small-sized SH guided wave transducer based on magnetostriction is proposed. The present transducer was designed to be modular and be used with shear couplant to avoid the inconvenience of the existing magnetostrictive patch transducers, which comprises the ferromagnetic patch tightly bonded to a structure. The wave transduction mechanism and the detailed configuration of the present transducer are presented. Experimental verification is also conducted on test specimens and the results confirm the good performance of the present transducer module.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.8
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• pp.1075-1081
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• 2010

Recently, the results of many studies have clarified the successful performance of magnetostrictive transducers in which a ferromagnetic patch is used for the transduction of guided shear waves; this is because a thin ferromagnetic patch with strong magnetostriction is very useful for generating and detecting shear wave. This investigation deals with bulk shear wave transduction by means of magnetostriction; on the other hand, the existing studies have been focused on guided shear waves. A modular transducer was developed; this transducer comprised a coil, magnets, and a thin ferromagnetic patch that was made of Fe-Co alloy. Some experiments were conducted to verify the performance of the developed transducer. Radiation directivity pattern of the developed transducer was obtained, and a test to detect the damage on a side drill hole of a steel block specimen was carried out. From the results of these tests, the good performance of the transducer for nondestructive testing was verified on the basis of the signal-to-noise ratio and narrow beam directivity.