Impedance inversion in eddy current testing of layered planar structures via neural networks

The inversion of eddy current probe impedance measurements is widely recognized as a complex theoretical problem whose solution is likely to have a significant impact on the characterization of materials. in this paper the evaluation of the conductivity profile of a layered planar structure is performed after inverting the impedance of a circular air-cored probe coil, of rectangular cross-section, using multilayer perceptron neural networks, trained via the back propagation learning algorithm. The merits of the method are illustrated in the light of two engineering examples. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.