Abstract
The anti-corrosive coating in pipeline and oil tanker is taken as a crucial component in petroleum industry and needs a robust NDE tool to evaluate its thickness. For the thick coating on the curved steel bases of various sizes, the eddy current sensor's evaluation capability for thick coating and the influence of the test-piece sizes on the evaluation precision are two key problems had to be solved. Taking into account the dimension effect of the sensor on signals, a wide-range sensor was designed and applied to the coating evaluation. The relationship between coil responses and liftoff was investigated and a NDE strategy based on a polynomial coefficient database was proposed to cope with the influence of test-piece sizes. Its applicability was verified by simulation results.