Development of Metal Inspection System Exploiting Magnetoresistive Sensors

Advances in magnetoresistive (MR) type sensors provide a new technique for nondestructive evaluation NDE of metal structures. MR sensors include high sensitivity and reduced size being produced by thin film processing techniques, the manufacturing cost of these sensors is low. This paper provides an attempt to develop an NDE system that depends on one type of MR sensors, namely the giant MR (GMR) elements. An example is considered of detecting defects in printed circuit boards. System details and experimental results are provided. Computational modeling validation is introduced based on finite element analysis