Wall thinning quantification with a lift-off distance for ferromagnetic structures using pulsed ECT equipped with ICA-Gauss filter and Hough Transform

Determining the thickness of ferromagnetic materials with a lift-off distance poses a significant challenge for current non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques. Pulsed eddy current (PEC) testing is deemed as a powerful candidate to evaluate this type of defect. However, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the PEC response signal obtained with large lift-off distance is very poor, so that the signal feature can hardly be extracted. To improve the SNR of PEC response signals and capture the signal feature adaptively, this paper proposed a novel PEC signal processing algorithm based on ICA-Gauss filter and Hough Transform (HT). Firstly, the principle of the proposed method was introduced. Then, two case studies, a comparison experiment and an application experiment were conducted to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of this method. Results from these experiments show that (a) the ICA-Gauss filter can effectively suppress the power-line noises and random noises in PEC signals, (b) the ICA-Gauss filter outperforms traditional filters in feature robustness and computing efficiency, including double-logarithmic median filter and Savitzky-Golay filter, and (c) HT is an adaptive and accurate method to extract the PEC signal feature, thus achieving a small detection error.