Coil Spring Inspection for Reliability Assurance of Automobile Suspension System using Guided Wave

Coil spring of automobile suspension system is very important to safety and dynamics of passenger car and requires a highly advanced quality control during manufacturing processes. Surface cracks on the coil spring rod produced by mechanical machining and heat treatment may cause a severe accident and large cost to the manufacturer. In order to detect surface cracks of the rod, guided wave technique is applied for a fast total volumetric inspection. Pochhammer equation is studied to investigate the dispersion characteristics of the guided wave in the spring rod and optimal wave modes sensitive to the surface crack are selected experimentally to design the experimental arrangement for the generation of guided wave. Rod samples with different size of artificial axial EDM notch on the surface ranging from 50${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ to 1 mm are examined by guided wave and inspection results discussed.