A Direction-Sensitive Microwave Sensor for Metal Crack Detection

Abstract

For metal crack nondestructive detection, most conventional crack sensors are unable to realize the crack direction detection. In this work, a direction-sensitive microwave sensor is proposed for metal crack detection. The proposed sensor consists of a rectangular patch resonator and two perpendicular coupled feeding ports, which improves the current distribution on patch surface and the sensitivity for crack direction detection. The performances of the proposed sensor are verified by simulation and measurement experiments. The results show that the width sensitivities of two feeding ports are 100 MHz/mm and 63.3 MHz/mm, respectively, and the sensitivity of the sensor for crack direction detection are 6.10 MHz/5 degrees and 1.93 MHz/5 degrees, respectively. Due to the advantages of a simple structure, low profile, large coverage area and high sensitivity, the proposed sensor has a great application potential in nondestructive detection fields.

Keywords

• structural health monitoring (SHM)
• metal crack detection
• direction-sensitive
• microwave sensor