Affiliations: [a] School of Information and Communication Engineering,
Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea | [b] School of Mechanical Engineering, Ajou University,
Suwon, Korea | [c] Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Il Han Park, School of Information and
Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 440-746, Korea. Il
Han Park Tel.: +82 31 290 7146; Fax: +82 31 290 7942; E-mail: ihpark@naver.com
Abstract: This paper proposes a nonlinear magnetic method to estimate the
thickness of carbon steel pipe used in the secondary steam cycle of nuclear
power plants. The principle of the proposed method is based on utilizing the
nonlinear property of magnetic saturation in carbon steel. A magnetic sensor
system for the nonlinear magnetic method is designed by the magnetic circuit
concept, and is modeled and analyzed with the finite element method and an
equivalent electric circuit. The sensor system is built to experimentally test
its performance in the estimation of wall thinning. To demonstrate the
feasibility and validity of the proposed nonlinear magnetic method, the
measured data from the sensor system are used to estimate the wall thinning,
and are compared with the analysis results.
Keywords: Wall thinning, nonlinear magnetic method, magnetic sensor, FEM, magnetic saturation
