Impedance inversion in eddy current testing of layered planar structures via neural networks

The inversion of eddy current probe impedance measurements is widely recognized as a complex theoretical problem whose solution is likely to have a significant impact on the characterization of materials. In this paper the evaluation of the conductivity profile of a layered planar structure is performed after inverting the impedance of a circular air-cored probe coil, of rectangular cross-section, using multilayer perceptron neural networks, trained via the back propagation learning algorithm. The merits of the method are illustrated in the light of two engineering examples.