Stress evaluation of ferromagnetic materials based on a new Barkhausen noise sensor composed by high entropy alloy magnetic core

During the service of ferromagnetic structural steel materials, stress should be evaluated accurately. Although the magnetic Barkhausen noise (MBN) testing has the ability to sense the stress, it can be easily interfered by environment. In this paper, a new MBN sensor is fabricated by selecting FeCoNi(AlMn)0.25 high entropy alloy (HEA) as the case of magnetic core to improve the accuracy of stress evaluation. The process optimization results show that the stability of MBN signal characteristics is the largest when the excitation frequency is 4Hz and the voltage is 6V. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of MBN indicates that the HEA and Ni-Zn ferrite probes have better anti-inference capability. The MBN signal characteristic values peak voltage (PV) and root-mean-square (RMS) measured by HEA probe can linearly quantify the stress level with higher efficiency, stability and accuracy. The underlying reason of high sensitivity of HEA probe to the variation of MBN signals is revealed based on the magnetic properties. The microstructure and the thermodynamic parameters are analyzed to clarify the additions of Al and Mn atoms can affect the short-ranged magnetic exchange interaction and lattice distortion, which affects the magnetization behavior of HEA. Finally, the availability of MBN sensor with HEA magnetic core to the stress evaluation on the retired slide rails of car seats is conducted, which demonstrates its great application value.