Stainless steel core panel is a novel structure for fast modular building, but its brazing foils are susceptible to defects due to the difficulty of precisely controlling the brazing process. An automated, nondestructive testing technique is highly desirable for quick inspection of the brazing defects buried in the stainless-steel core panel. In this paper, pulsed eddy current testing (PECT) was employed to inspect local incomplete brazing defects. Finite element simulation and experiment verification were conducted to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The peak value of the PECT signal was found to be sensitive to the presence of the defect. With the aid of an industrial robotic arm, line and two-dimensional scans were performed of the PECT probe above the panel specimen. The prefabricated incomplete brazing foil was successfully imaged as a notched ring, whose opening coincides with the physical length of the missing brazing. The proposed method shows potential to serve as an effective tool for in-line or off-line automated nondestructive testing of the brazing defects in stainless steel core panels.
Keywords: brazing defect; nondestructive testing; pulsed eddy current; stainless steel core panel.