Pulsed eddy current (PEC) is an electromagnetic nondestructive technique widely used to detect and quantify the flaws in conducting materials. In the present study a differential Hall-sensor probe which is used in the PEC system has been fabricated for the detection of defects in stainless steel pipelines. The differential probe has an exciting coil with two Hall-sensors. A stainless steel test sample with electrical discharge machining (EDM) notches under different depths of 1–5 mm was made and the sample was laminated by plastic insulation having uniform thickness to simulate the pipelines in nuclear power plants (NPPs). The driving coil in the probe is excited by a rectangular current pulse and the resultant response, which is the difference of the two Hall–sensors, has been detected as the PEC probe signal. The discriminating time domain features of the detected pulse such as peak value and time to zero are used to interpret the experimental results with the defects in the test sample. A feature extraction technique such as spectral power density has been devised to infer the PEC response.

Unlike conventional Eddy Current Test (ECT), Pulsed Eddy Current (PEC) uses a multiple-frequency current pulse through the excitation coil. In the present study, the detection of subsurface cracks using a specially designed probe that allows the detection of a deeper crack with a relatively small current density has been attempted using the PEC technique. The tested sample is a piece of 304 stainless steel (SS304) with a thickness of 30mm. Small electrical discharge machining (EDM) notches were put in the test sample at different depths from the surface to simulate the subsurface cracks in a pipe. The designed PEC probe consists of an excitation coil and a Hall sensor and can detect a subsurface crack as narrow and shallow as 0.2 mm wide and 2 mm deep. The maximum distance between the probe and the defect is 28 mm. The peak amplitude of the detected pulse is used to evaluate the cracks under the sample surface. In time domain analysis, the greater the crack depth the greater the peak amplitude of the detected pulse. The experimental results indicated that the proposed system has the potential to detect the subsurface cracks in stainless steel plates.