The sensory portion of the system consists of a superconducting, high Q, radio frequency LC resonator inductively coupled to moving ferritic strip. The quality factor (Q) of this resonator is determined to obtain a measure of energy dissipated in the coupled steel alloys. Dissipative energy in the sample results from two sources, hysteresis and eddy currents.
The information is collected from the transducer array and fed into an intelligent perceptual network that renders a superior sensory system capable of discriminating between the effects of the complex non-linear interactions of the multitudinous process control variables that are nondestructively imaged in a final macrostructural view of the ferritic microstructure as it exists in the coil before shipping to the customer.
The following is a sample of a color-contour plot generated by the MicroCert System.
Each frame in this animation represents a MicroCert image of 10 meters of ultra-low carbon (ULC) steel strip. |
| This contour plot is generated from the sensory array which garners data representative of the mechanical properties of the steel strip. This model is indicative of a steel mill application where the plot could represent the yield strength of steel strip during rolling. A printout of this output could be associated with an actual length of strip (which is shipped out in coil form) as an indication of quality to the end user. For the first time anywhere the mechanical properties of the steel will be accounted for throughout the entire strip. |
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