Evaluation of fatigue damage in an austenitic stainless steel (SUS304) using the eddy current probe

In order to prevent accidents, it is very important to evaluate fatigue damage in an austenitic stainless steel, which is widely used in structural components of industries. Some research groups have already proposed the evaluation method such as the residual magnetization method for this purpose. The residual magnetization method was effective to evaluate fatigue damage in austenitic stainless steels. However, this method was hard to use on site because that a magnetizer is needed. Therefore, we developed the non-destructive (NDT) system with an eddy current probe to use on site. This system could clearly detect fatigue process including damage accumulation in SUS304 (ANSI-304). In this paper, we report on the detection result of the plane bend fatigue damage of SUS304 and the NDT system with the eddy current probe.