Kriging for Eddy-Current Testing Problems

Accurate numerical simulation of Eddy-Current Testing (ECT) experiments usually requires large computational efforts. So, a natural idea is to build a cheap approximation of the expensive-to-run simulator. This paper presents an approximation method based on functional kriging. Kriging is widely used in other domains, but is still unused in the ECT community. Its main idea is to build a random process model of the simulator. The extension of kriging to the case of functional output data (which is the typical case in ECT) is a recent development of mathematics. The paper introduces functional kriging and illustrates its performance via numerical examples using an ECT simulator based on a surface integral method. A comparison with other classical data interpolation methods is also carried out.