SBIR Phase I: Magnetic Pressure Sensor Technology for Detection of Corrosion and NDT Applications

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is aimed at developing a nondestructive testing device based on Magnetic Pressure Sensor Technology. The innovation can detect steel mass and corrosion in bridges, tendons, infrastructures, and pipes. The technical level of this innovation is ?early stage?, where the scientific principles have been identified and feasibility will be established in this effort. Safety is an increasing concern for the nation?s bridges. According to a bridge report published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), over two hundred million trips are taken daily across deficient bridges in the United States? largest metropolitan regions. The innovation possesses favorable features that make it suitable for different non-destructive testing (NDT) applications. Those features include it being safe to operate, having real-time fast imaging speed, light-weight, battery operated, scalable to different sizes, flexible to address different shapes, and affordable to multiple field deployments. The overall market for non-destructive testing and inspection was valued at $6.46B in 2015 and is expected to increase to $11.39B by 2022 at a CAGR of 8.3% between 2016 and 2022. The intellectual merit of this project is the development of a Magnetic-Pressure-Sensors (MaPS) device, which already demonstrated significant promise for use in generating volumetric images of steel mass loss in exposed post-tension reinforcement tendons in bridges. Rotating the MaPS device around the circumference of the tendon or placing multiple devices around the circumference; can provide a 2D cross-section map of the total internal steel mass distribution. The device has also been tested on corroded steel rods and it was able to react only to the total steel mass as rust (mainly Fe2O3) loses the magnetic property of iron. The innovation here is the combination of a magnet, a pressure sensor between the magnet and the surface of the structure, and a communication device to report the force detected by the pressure sensor. This combination provides a force signal directly correlated to the mass and location of steel inside the inspected structure. The objective of this proposal is to develop a MaPS sensor technology to measure and image steel mass loss in bridge tendons and pipelines. This will be achieved by developing a magnet arrangement for better penetration depth, an activation pattern of distributed magnets, image reconstruction, and mechanical enclosure.