Study of metal magnetic memory (MMM) technique using permanently installed magnetic sensor arrays

The metal magnetic memory (MMM) effect has been reported to be a non-destructive testing technique capable of evaluating stress concentration and detecting defects in steel. This method has been shown to work well in some instances, but has failed in other trials. Its mechanism has been explained widely but the sensitivity to stress concentration has not been satisfactorily investigated. In this paper, both the normal and tangential components of the stress induced MMM signal were measured by two permanently installed magnetic sensor arrays on two types of notched L80 steel specimens. As expected, the results show that an externally applied magnetic field changes the magnetic field perturbation due to the notches linearly. Plastic deformation and residual stress around notches will increase the remnant flux leakage but the effects are small, which suggests that the MMM effect is very small in the material tested and that it will not be useful in practice.The metal magnetic memory (MMM) effect has been reported to be a non-destructive testing technique capable of evaluating stress concentration and detecting defects in steel. This method has been shown to work well in some instances, but has failed in other trials. Its mechanism has been explained widely but the sensitivity to stress concentration has not been satisfactorily investigated. In this paper, both the normal and tangential components of the stress induced MMM signal were measured by two permanently installed magnetic sensor arrays on two types of notched L80 steel specimens. As expected, the results show that an externally applied magnetic field changes the magnetic field perturbation due to the notches linearly. Plastic deformation and residual stress around notches will increase the remnant flux leakage but the effects are small, which suggests that the MMM effect is very small in the material tested and that it will not be useful in practice.