FLUXGATE SENSORS BASED ON MAGNETIC MICROWIRES FOR WEAK MAGNETIC FIELDS MEASUREMENT

Jozef Hudák – Pavol Lipovský – Ján Bajús – Andrej Čverha – Peter Klein
– Rastislav Varga – Jozef Onufer –Ján Ziman

   The dominating trend in the reduction of dimensions, power consumption and cost of sensors in conjunction with the re-quirement of their precision and dynamics improvement and also in the range of the measured fields leads in the area of the fluxgate magnetometers to the replacement of the conventional sensors by their microwire substitutions. The article summarizes results of the transfer characteristics measurements of the developed microwire fluxgate sensors. These sensors are designed for the vector measurements of the low frequency weak magnetic fields. The basis for a determination of the sensors' charac-teristics lies in the repeated measurements during the one second time intervals in the defined operating points and also in the measurement of the differentials of the time intervals obtained during the alternating magnetizations in the defined magnetic field. Based on the measured static and dynamic transfer characteristics microwire fluxgate sensors with a different chemical composition and core geometry from various manufacturers are compared. The results of the experiments creates the basis for a consideration of the possibility to replace currently used amorphous ribbon core sensors in the VEMA series magnetometers with the fluxgate sensors based on magnetic microwires.

Keywords: microwire, sensor, magnetometer, transfer characteristics

[full-paper]