Improve the signal to noise ratio and installation convenience of the inductive coil for wire rope nondestructive testing

Inductive coil is used as the nondestructive testing sensor of a wire rope or a pipe, because of its low cost and high durability. However, the winding structure is complex and difficult to design during the field test. Hundreds or even thousands of turns are needed to improve the signal to noise ratio (SNR) and the data processing is cumbersome. In this paper, based on the theoretical analysis and 3D transient magnetic field simulation, a kind of iron core is presented as coil winding skeleton for the wire rope nondestructive testing. Additional iron core plays a role of magnetism concentration, where the magnetic flux leakage (MFL) path is changed and the MFL of the defect is converged to the core. Therefore, the SNR of the coil which is wound on the iron core is improved, and the coil winding skeleton is simplified with the iron core structure optimization. Meanwhile, the influence of the coil cross-section area on the test result analysis is eliminated, and the influence of the lift-off distance between coil and wire rope on the detection result is also reduced. Finally, it is proved by experiment that the SNR of coil with the iron core proposed in this paper is increased almost six times, which makes it easier for defect analysis.