The use of failure-prone components in critical applications has been traditionally governed by removing such components from service prior to the expiration of their predicted life expectancy. Such early retirement of materials does not guarantee that a particular sample will not fail in actual usage. The increasing cost of such life expectancy based operation and increased demand for improved reliability in industrial settings has necessitated an alternate form of quality control. Modern applications employ nondestructive evaluation (NDE), also known as nondestructive testing (NDT), as a means of monitoring the levels and growth of defects in a material throughout its operational life. This thesis describes the modifications made to existing instrumentation used for magnetic measurements at the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation at Iowa State University. Development of a new portable instrument is also given. An overview of the structure and operation of this instrumentation is presented. This thesis discusses the application of the magnetic hysteresis and Barkhausen measurement techniques, described in Sections 1.3.1 and 1.3.2 respectively, to a number of ferromagnetic specimens. Specifically, measurements were made on a number of railroad steel specimens for fatigue characterization, and on specimens of Damascus steel and Terfenol-D for materials evaluation. 60 refs., 51 figs.,more » 5 tabs.« less