Eddy Current Test of Fin Tubes for a Heat Exchanger

Eddy current probes were designed to be suitable for the test of fin tubes. Fin tubes, often used for heat exchangers, have uneven outer and inner surfaces to enhance the heat emission. The surface roughness makes it difficult to detect flaws employing eddy current test (ECT). In order to overcome the difficulties we performed two kinds of works, one is the development of ECT probes, and the other is the signal processing including fast Fourier transform and digital filtering. In the development of ECT probes, we adopted empirical design method. Our ECT probes for the fin tubes are inside type. And we are specially concerned about geometric features such as the widths of the coils composing an ECT probe. We fabricated four probes with various coil widths. Eddy current test was performed using those ECT probes on artificially flawed specimens. After analyzing the output signals, we found that, for the effective testing, the width of a coil should be determined considering the pitch of the fins of a tube. And we also learned that the frequency filtering could improve the s/n.