Coating thickness measurement of multilayer ferromagnetic samples based on pulsed eddy current testing technology

Abstract

Pulsed eddy current (PEC) technology serves as a popular testing method for multilayer structures and is widely used in coating and substrate thickness measurement. However, in the coating thickness measurement of a multilayer structure, the substrate thickness effect is a disturbance that needs to be eliminated urgently. In order to reduce the substrate thickness effect, in this paper a twice difference normalisation method is proposed to obtain a signal feature independently of the substrate thickness effect for measuring the coating thickness of a multilayer ferromagnetic structure. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that a fitting line of the peak value of twice difference normalisation signals can be obtained by using the twice difference normalisation method when only the coating thickness changes. The normalisation fitting line is immune to the substrate thickness effect and can be used to measure the coating thickness of a multilayer ferromagnetic structure, which means that the twice difference normalisation method is feasible for high-precision evaluation of the coating thickness of a multilayer ferromagnetic structure when the substrate thickness changes. This study will improve the coating thickness measurement accuracy of multilayer ferromagnetic structures when the substrate thickness changes in the PEC testing.