Design of a pulsed eddy current sensor for detection of defects in aircraft lap-joints

This paper presents a new type of pulsed eddy current (PEC) sensor that has been designed for defect detection in aircraft lap-joint structures. The sensor employs a new excitation circuit that requires no additional signal amplification and the paper also reports compensation techniques that improve the sensing resolution and stability. A new hybrid feature of the peak value in time domain and the maximum frequency magnitude in frequency domain has been investigated. A test rig has been built and some results from aircraft samples are presented