Abstract:In traditional pulsed eddy current (PEC) nondestructive testing (NDT) technique usually a reflection-type probe is used, which consists of a pancake exciting coil for generation of incident magnetic field and a pick-up coil or a solid-state magnetic field sensor for detecting the perturbed magnetic field. However, due to the restriction of the traditional structure of PEC probes, the incident magnetic field generated by the excitation coil is much stronger than the eddy current induced magnetic field, thus reducing the detection sensitivity, and a reference signal must be subtracted from total transient response signal to get the flaw information, the process of difference may bring errors. A new PEC sensor is proposed, which, in crack defect quantification, does not need the difference processing by changing the distribution of exciting magnetic field with a rectangular exciting coil. The principle of the new sensor is analyzed first, and then, the performance of the sensor is verified by the method of combining simulation with experiment together, the agreement in experiment with theory shows that the present sensor is effective.