Thanks to high sensitivity, excellent scalability, and low power consumption, magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ)-based tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors have been widely implemented in various industrial fields. In nondestructive magnetic flux leakage testing, the magnetic sensor plays a significant role in the detection results. As highly sensitive sensors, integrated MTJs can suppress frequency-dependent noise and thereby decrease detectivity; therefore, serial MTJ-based sensors allow for the design of high-performance sensors to measure variations in magnetic fields. In the present work, we fabricated serial MTJ-based TMR sensors and connected them to a full Wheatstone bridge circuit. Because noise power can be suppressed by using bridge configuration, the TMR sensor with Wheatstone bridge configuration showed low noise spectral density (0.19 μV/Hz0.5) and excellent detectivity (5.29 × 10−8 Oe/Hz0.5) at a frequency of 1 Hz. Furthermore, in magnetic flux leakage testing, compared with one TMR sensor, the Wheatstone bridge TMR sensors provided a higher signal-to-noise ratio for inspection of a steel bar. The one TMR sensor system could provide a high defect signal due to its high sensitivity at low lift-off (4 cm). However, as a result of its excellent detectivity, the full Wheatstone bridge-based TMR sensor detected the defect even at high lift-off (20 cm). This suggests that the developed TMR sensor provides excellent detectivity, detecting weak field changes in magnetic flux leakage testing.

Magnetic flux leakage (MFL) testing is a method of non-destructive testing (NDT), whereby the material is magnetized, and when a defect is present, the magnetic flux lines break out of the material. The magnitude of the leaked magnetic flux decreases as the lift-off (distance from the material) increases. Therefore, for detection at high lift-off, a sensitive magnetic sensor is required. To increase the output sensitivity, this paper proposes the application of magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) sensors in a bridge circuit for the NDT of reinforced concrete at high lift-off. MTJ sensors were connected to a full-bridge circuit, where one side of the arm has two MTJ sensors connected in series, and the other contains a resistor and a variable resistor. Their responses towards a bias magnetic field were measured, and, based on the results, the sensor circuit sensitivity was 0.135 mV/mT. Finally, a reinforced concrete specimen with a 1 cm gap in the center was detected. The sensor module (with an amplifier and low pass filter circuits) could determine the gap even at 50 cm, suggesting that MTJ sensors have the potential to detect defects at high lift-off values and have a promising future in the field of NDT.