Optimization of a Focusable and Rotatable Shear-Wave Periodic Permanent Magnet Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducers for Plates Inspection

Due to the symmetry of conventional periodic-permanent-magnet electromagnetic acoustic transducers (PPM EMATs), two shear (SH) waves can be generated and propagated simultaneously in opposite directions, which makes the signal recognition and interpretation complicatedly. Thus, this work presents a new SH wave PPM EMAT design, rotating the parallel line sources to realize the wave beam focusing in a single-direction. The theoretical model of distributed line sources was deduced firstly, and the effects of some parameters, such as the inner coil width, adjacent line sources spacing and the angle between parallel line sources, on SH wave focusing and directivity were studied mainly with the help of 3D FEM. Employing the proposed PPM EMATs, some experiments are carried out to verify the reliability of FEM simulation. The results indicate that rotating the parallel line sources can strength the wave on the closing side of line sources, decreasing the inner coil width and the adjacent line sources spacing can improve the amplitude and directivity of signals excited by transducers. Compared with traditional PPM EMATs, both the capacity of unidirectional excitation and directivity of the proposed PPM EMATs are improved significantly.