Intensive Study of Skin Effect in Eddy Current Testing With Pancake Coil

Skin depth is an important parameter that quantifies depth of inspection of eddy current (EC) nondestructive testing. The formula which states that the skin depth is inversely proportional to the square root of the product of frequency, permeability, and conductivity has been widely used for calculating skin depth for many decades. It has been noticed that the true skin depth is less than that obtained by the formula when the EC is excited by the ac current in a pancake coil. In-depth and convincible explanation of this discrepancy has not been published. This paper studies this problem by finite-element analysis and concludes that the difference is due to two reasons. One is that the EC associated with pancake coil diffuses with increasing depth, whereas there is no diffusion effect of EC associated with uniform plane field which is the assumption of the conventional formula. The other reason is that the ECs induced by wire segments symmetric about the coil axis cancel each other and the cancellation becomes more severe with increasing depth due to the diffusion of EC. This paper also investigates the influence of each of coil parameters on skin depth. Then, a new formula for estimating skin depth is proposed.