Quantitative Modeling of the Transduction of Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducers Operating on Ferromagnetic Media

The noncontact nature of electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMATs) offers a series of advantages over traditional piezoelectric transducers, but these features are counter-balanced by their relatively low signal-to-noise ratio and their strong dependence on material properties such as electric conductivity, magnetic permeability, and magnetostriction. The implication is that full exploitation of EMATs needs detailed modeling of their operation. A finite element model, accounting for the main transduction mechanisms, has been developed to allow the optimization of the transducers. Magnetostriction is included and described through an analogy with piezoelectricity. The model is used to predict the performance of a simple EMAT: a single current-carrying wire, parallel to a bias magnetic field generating shear horizontal waves in a nickel plate close to it. The results are validated against experiments. The model is able to successfully predict the wave amplitude dependence on significant parameters: the static bias field, the driving current amplitude, and the excitation frequency. The comparison does not employ any arbitrary adjustable parameter; for the first time an absolute validation of a magnetostrictive EMAT model has been achieved. The results are satisfactory: the discrepancy between the numerical predictions and the measured values of wave amplitude per unit current is less than 20% over a 200 kHz frequency range. The study has also shown that magnetostrictive EMAT sensitivity is not only a function of the magnetostrictive properties, because the magnetic permeability also plays a significant role in the transduction mechanism, partly counterbalancing the magnetostrictive effects.