USE OF NON-DESTRUCTIVE HYDROGEN CONTENT SENSORS TO MONITOR MATERIAL INTEGRITY

Hydrogen is notorious for its dynamic, hard-to-detect , and corrosive nature in materials. In many cases, hydrogen damage is responsible for failures in which hydrogen was never attributed as the cause, including "stress corrosion cracking" and a variety of other failure mechanisms. Non-destructive sensors have been developed for rapid determination of hydrogen and hydride content in steels, stainless steels, and advanced materials. The non-destructive sensors operate at the electronic level making them even more sensitive than analytical techniques at very low hydrogen concentrations. The sensors assess the electronic structure of the material and any perturbations in the electronic structure due to crystallinity, defects, microstructural phases and features, manufacturing and processing, and service-induced strains. Electronic, magnetic, and elastic properties have all been correlated to fundamental properties of materials. With proper calibration and standardization, electronic and electromagnetic techniques for real-time, non-destructive hydrogen content measurements will be presented.