본 연구에서는 와이어로프의 국부손상 검색을 위해 누설자속기법을 적용하였다. 와이어로프 구조물에 적용하기 위해 리프트오프의 발생을 최소화한 4채널 누설자속 센서헤드를 제작하였고, 이를 사용하여 와이어로프의 국부손상 검색실험을 수행하였다. 국부손상 검색실험을 위해 와이어로프를 준비하였고, 다양한 원주방향을 가지는 부분 단선 손상들을 발생시켰다. 제작된 자속누설 센서헤드를 이용하여 와이어로프 시편의 자속신호를 스캔하였고, 노이즈의 영향을 최소화하고 자속신호의 해상도를 향상시키고자 자속 신호를 미분하여 순간변화량을 손상 검색에 활용하였다. 객관적인 손상 판단을 위해 각 채널에서 계측된 자속신호를 GEV분포를 이용해 설정된 임계값과 비교하였다. 최종적으로 임계값을 초과한 부분의 길이방향 및 원주방향 위치를 실제 손상과 비교함으로써 본 기법의 국부손상 검색 가능성을 살펴보았다.

In this study, a magnetic flux leakage (MFL) method that is known as a suitable non-destructive evaluation (NDE) method for continuum ferromagnetic members was applied to detect the various types of local damages of the steel wire ropes. 3types of artificial damages, such as cutting, corrosion and compression, were formed on wire rope specimen. A multi-channel MFL sensor head that can maintain the constant lift-off was fabricated to scan the wire rope specimen. The fabricated MFL sensor head measured the magnetic flux signals from the three types of damaged specimens. The capability of damage detection according to damage type was verified from the measured MFL signals from each type of damage. And, the characteristics of the MFL signals were compared and analyzed by type of damage.

Magnetic flux ropes, often observed during intervals of interplanetary coronal mass ejections, have long been recognized to be critical in space weather. In this work, we focus on magnetic flux rope structure but on a much smaller scale, and not necessarily related to interplanetary coronal mass ejections. Using near-Earth solar wind advanced composition explorer (ACE) observations from 1998 to 2016, we identified a total of 309 small-scale magnetic flux ropes (SMFRs). We compared the characteristics of identified SMFR events with those of normal magnetic cloud (MC) events available from the existing literature. First, most of the MCs and SMFRs have similar values of accompanying solar wind speed and proton densities. However, the average magnetic field intensity of SMFRs is weaker (~7.4 nT) than that of MCs (~10.6 nT). Also, the average duration time and expansion speed of SMFRs are ~2.5 hr and 2.6 km/s, respectively, both of which are smaller by a factor of ~10 than those of MCs. In addition, we examined the geoeffectiveness of SMFR events by checking their correlation with magnetic storms and substorms. Based on the criteria Sym-H < -50 nT (for identification of storm occurrence) and AL < -200 nT (for identification of substorm occurrence), we found that for 88 SMFR events (corresponding to 28.5 % of the total SMFR events), substorms occurred after the impact of SMFRs, implying a possible triggering of substorms by SMFRs. In contrast, we found only two SMFRs that triggered storms. We emphasize that, based on a much larger database than used in previous studies, all these previously known features are now firmly confirmed by the current work. Accordingly, the results emphasize the significance of SMFRs from the viewpoint of possible triggering of substorms.