A careful examination of the magnetization of a ferromagnetic material reveals that it is a discontinuous process; when subject to a varying magnetic field, a ferromagnetic material is magnetized in discrete bursts as domain boundaries overcome pinning at defects in the crystal lattice. This discrete behavior manifests itself as high frequency “noise” superimposed upon a measurement of magnetic flux and is commonly referred to as the Barkhausen Effect. Several important microstructural properties of steel also depend on lattice defect structure, i.e., mechanical hardness, ferrite content, material fatigue, and internal stress state, and investigators have successfully correlated Barkhausen Effect parameters with these properties [1–3]. Unfortunately, Barkhausen noise signals are broadband and weak, characteristics that often limit the utility of the Barkhausen Effect in NDE applications. In this paper, we will describe a phenomenon we call Barkhausen Demodulation, which provides a means of measuring Barkhausen noise that lends itself more readily to NDE investigations. Further, we will describe an experiment in which Barkhausen Demodulation was used to measure the hardness of X40 grade pipeline steel.</p
