Advanced Electromagnetic Models for Materials Characterization and Nondestructive Evaluation

This book expands on the subject matter of ’Computational Electromagnetics and Model-Based Inversion: A Modern Paradigm for Eddy-Current Nondestructive Evaluation.’ It includes (a) voxel-based inversion methods, which are generalizations of model-based algorithms; (b) a complete electromagnetic model of advanced composites (and other novel exotic materials), stressing the highly anisotropic nature of these materials, as well as giving a number of applications to nondestructive evaluation; and (c) an up-to-date discussion of stochastic integral equations and propagation-of-uncertainty models in nondestructive evaluation. As such, the book combines research started twenty-five years ago in advanced composites and voxel-based algorithms, but published in scattered journal articles, as well as recent research in stochastic integral equations. All of these areas are of considerable interest to the aerospace, nuclear power, civil infrastructure, materials characterization and biomedical industries.

The book covers the topic of computational electromagnetics in eddy-current nondestructive evaluation (NDE) by emphasizing three distinct topics: (a) fundamental mathematical principles of volume-integral equations as a subset of computational electromagnetics, (b) mathematical algorithms applied to signal-processing and inverse scattering problems, and (c) applications of these two topics to problems in which real and model data are used. It is therefore more than an academic exercise and is valuable to users of eddy-current NDE technology in industries as varied as nuclear power, aerospace, materials characterization and biomedical imaging.

Dr. Harold A Sabbagh founded Sabbagh Associates in 1980 to solve problems and do research in the engineering and physical sciences. The company’s major thrust in recent years has been modeling and algorithm development in electromagnetic (eddy-current) nondestructive evaluation. This work has been supported by private industry and a number of government agencies, especially through the Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR). (With awards totaling $4M, the company is one of the largest recipient of SBIR funding in the State of Indiana.) Dr. Sabbagh has been the principal investigator for most of these projects. Dr. Sabbagh and his brother, Dr. L. David Sabbagh, were awarded The Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP) Achievement Award for their work on “Verification of Field Flaw Models.” TTCP consists of members of the defense departments of Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the US. Of the nine TTCP awards made in 1992, “Verification of Field Flaw Models” was one of two awards received by Subgroup-P (Materials Technology). The research cited in the award is the basis of the commercial code VIC-3Dc , that is being developed and marketed by Victor Technologies, a company founded by Harold A. Sabbagh in 1998. He has published widely in the areas of computational modeling in engineering, and has presented a number of conference papers, especially in the area of electromagnetic (eddy-current) nondestructive evaluation, and has conducted short-courses in this area. He was elected a Fellow of the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society in 2010.

Dr. Murphy is the author of the analysis portions of VIC-3D©, Victor Technologies’ volume-integral code for modeling problems in electromagnetic (eddy-current) nondestructive evaluation(NDE). He has published extensively in the area of numerical modeling with VIC-3D© in the aerospace, materials characterization and nuclear power industries.