Metal Discriminator

Girish O Pranav Agarwal

Dept. of Electrical Engineering Dept. of Electrical Engineering
IIT Bombay IIT Bombay
Mumbai, India Mumbai, India
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract—Metal discriminators are electronic devices which and collapses very suddenly, thus resulting in a sharp electrical
can detect the presence of metal and discriminate the type spike lasting for few micro seconds. If the metal detector is
of metal. The metal detectors are present in airports, office over a metal object, the pulse creates an opposite magnetic
buildings, schools, government agencies, prisons, etc helps to
ensure safety while consumer-oriented metal detectors provides field in object, which causes the magnetic field due to a
opportunity to discover hidden treasures, none of them can dis- particular pulse to decay slowly, so by measuring the width
criminate the type of metals. Here we are focusing on consumer- we can determine the presence of metal. These metal detectors
oriented metal detectors which can detect and discriminate the are not good at discrimination since reflected pulse length of
types of metals. We use the fact that the inductive property of a various metals are not easily separated. They are useful in
metal is proportional to its conductivity to discriminate the type
of metals. areas that have highly conductive material in the soil or general
Index Terms—Metal detector, Metal discriminator, D-shaped environment such as salt water exploration.
coils, Eight shaped coils, High Q active band pass filter, Magni- Here we are using VLF technology to develop our metal de-
tude independent phase detection. tector. Here there are two coils in which one acts as transmitter
and other as receiver. The transmitter and receiver are arranged
I. I NTRODUCTION
in such a way that net EMF (Electromotive Force) generated
Metal Detectors generally use one of the three technologies in the receiver due to transmitter is zero in normal condition. If
mentioned below. the coil passes over a metal object, the magnetic field induces
• Beat Frequency Oscillator (BFO) an eddy current in the metal object, which generates its own
• Pulse Induction (PI) field inducing voltage in receiver coil, from this voltage we
• Very Low Frequency (VLF) can detect the presence of metal. Due to the inductive nature
The most basic way to detect metal uses a technology called of the metal there is a phase difference between the induced
beat-frequency oscillator (BFO). [1] In a BFO system, there eddy current and the transmitter signal which remains constant
are two coils of wire. One large coil is in the search head, and for particular metal. Since inductive nature of the metal is
a smaller coil is located inside the control box. Each coil is proportional to its conductivity, thus the phase difference
connected to an oscillator that generates thousands of pulses observed too is proportional to its conductivity. Conductivity
of current per second. The frequency of these pulses is slightly for a metal depends on its composition and remains constant at
offset between the two coils. As the pulses travel through particular environmental conditions. Thus, the phase difference
each coil, the coil generates radio waves. A tiny receiver can be used to discriminate between metals. [4]
within the control box picks up the radio waves and creates an
audible series of tones (beats) based on the difference between II. D ESIGN I MPLEMENTATION
the frequencies. If the coil in the search head passes over a
metal object, the magnetic field caused by the current flowing Here we are transmitting 940 Hz sine wave which is gen-
through the coil creates a magnetic field around the object. erated using an oscillator circuit and then amplified by power
The object’s magnetic field interferes with the frequency of amplifier. The received signal is amplified using an instru-
the radio waves generated by the search-head coil. As the mentational amplifier followed by a Band Pass Filter (BPF) to
frequency deviates from the frequency of the coil in the control remove out of band noise signal. The phase difference between
box, the audible beats change in duration and tone. this filtered signal and the transmitted signal is estimated using
The simplicity of BFO based systems allows them to be lock-in phase detector. The traditional lock-in amplifier was
manufactured and sold for a very low cost, but these detectors modified to make its output independent of magnitude of input
do not provide the level of control and accuracy provided by signal. Along with the new modification in lockin amplifier
VLF or PI systems. we are checking the phase at particular signal level, this
[1] PI uses a single coil as transmitter and receiver. This reduces error in phase measurement due to magnitude. These
technology sends powerful, short bursts(pulses) of current information is finally sent to the microcontroller through ADC
through a coil, each pulse generating brief magnetic field. which has an hard coded table for phase difference shown by
When the pulse ends, the magnetic field reverses its polarity various commonly available metals.
 Reference
Power Wien Bridge
Tx Coil Clock
Amplifier Oscillator
Generator

AC coupled
Rx Coil IN Amp Active BPF Lock-in Amp LPF Level Shifter
Comparator

Full Wave 89C5131A MCP3008

LPF Comparator
Rectifier Microcontroller ADC

LED Display

Fig. 1. Block Diagram for Metal Discriminator

Thus the metal discriminated is display directly on LCD.

Figure 1 shows the overall block diagram of our the Metal +12V
Discriminator.
10kΩ
A. Oscillator
+12V

1.303kΩ 22pF − Vout

1.303kΩ
Vin
+
+5V
22pF
+ −12V
Vout
10kΩ
−

−12V
−5V

Fig. 3. Power Amplifier

10kΩ 10kΩ 10kΩ 10kΩ

Also we cannot connect the output of the oscillator through
buffer because peak current flowing through the coil is close
to 1 A which will damage the opamp. If we want to buffer
the output of oscillator then we have to use power opamp
Fig. 2. Wien Bridge Oscillator
which is very expensive and it is not available in lab. So,
we used the Fig. 3 circuit which can be implemented using
The oscillator is Wein Bridge oscillator(Fig. 2) with ampli- commercial opamp. The beauty of the circuit lies in the two
tude stabilization. [12] By connecting two diodes as per the MOSFETs which provides necessary current needed by the
diagram, it ensures that until the diode is forward biased (that coil by keeping the current flowing through the opamp to
is |vout| < 0.7) the gain of the circuit is large, which helps safety limits. Here two diodes are connected to introduce
in oscillation to build up. When either of the diode become a small change in switching point to ensure that both the
forward biased the gain goes to 3 which is the minimum MOSFETs won’t switch on at the same time.
required to sustain oscillation.
C. Coils

B. Power Amplifier Designing the coils was one of the biggest challenge, coil is
the most critical part in the design. Deciding the dimensions
We cannot connect an inductor directly to the output of os- of the coil like shape, number of turns and also number of
cillator, since impedance of the oscillator will change causing coils required for effective operation are critical. After some
oscillations to cease. searching [2] we found that D-shaped coils are best suited
for our application since D-shaped coils penetrate more than
the circular coil of same dimension. Since we are using VLF
metal detector we have to use at least two coils, one acting
as transmitter and other receiver, three coils configuration is
also possible where there is two transmitter and one receiver
coil. Since we are using D-shaped coils it is very difficult to
calculate the field at a particular point mathematically, so for
testing purpose we made 2 pairs of coil of diameter 9 inch (70
turns) and 5.5 inch(140 turns) to get an idea of the range and
magnitude of received signal. The reason for using coils having
2 diameter is detection range increase with diameter and the
size of the smallest object that can be detected degrades with
diameter.This is due to the fact that smaller coils have more
concentrated fields, which can detect smaller objects. [3]

Another way to wind the coil is in form of Eight as shown

in Fig 4. Here the two halves of eight shaped coil acts as
two individual transmitter coil which carries equal current in
opposite direction. So, the major advantage we observed by
using this structure is easy cancellation of the transmitter field
in receiver coil. But we cannot use this coil for discrimination
because the phase shift observed is 180◦ out of phase when
the metal is brought near to each half of eight.

Winding surface for both the shape i.e. D and 8 were made
by stacking card-board pieces cut in shape Fig. 4.
Fig. 4. Coils
Next bigger task is choosing the frequency of operation.
If frequency of operation is smaller then penetration depth
Similarly a capacitor is connected in parallel to the coil at
will be larger but the sensitivity is small. So if we want to
the receiver. These resonator circuits acts a BPF which works
detect smaller objects then we have to increase the frequency
as EMI rejection circuits and also eliminates noise outside the
of operation but it will degrades the depth of penetration. More
bandwidth of BPF. We also twisted the coil ends(upto the input
over we cannot increase the frequency to MHz range since we
of instrumentation amplifier ) so that it forms a twisted pair
are using breadboard to test our circuit, which adds parasitics
cable, which also reduces EMI.
at these frequency range. So we chosen the frequency of
operation around 1K(940 Hz), to eliminate the above short
comings. D. Instrumentation Amplifier

Next step is to determine the inductance of coil. For that [7] The receiver coil is again AC coupled to the input of
we connected a capacitance of 1µF in series and varied instrumentation amplifier to eliminate the low frequency noise.
the oscillation frequency until voltage across the inductor is The idea behind using instrumentation amplifier to eliminate
maximum. That frequency is the resonance frequency and noise in the received signal by amplifying the differential
from that inductance of the coil can be calculated. This method voltage between the terminals of coil. Since noise can be
of determining inductance is best when compared to other considered as common mode signal, in-amp will improve the
methods, since we have to model the coil as a inductor with SNR of signal. The gain of the in-amp is set to around 50,
series resistance. if the gain of the in-amp is larger it is difficult to cancel the
effect of transmitter field on receiver coil.
Now we need to create resonance at these frequencies. In
the transmitter side we connected a capacitor in series with E. Band Pass Filter
coil to cause the resonance at operating frequency. The reason
for connecting the capacitor in series is, at series resonance The output of the instrumentation amplifier is fed to active
impedance offered by the circuit is lowest (here DC resistance bandpass filter (Fig. 5)to further filter the noise outside signal
of coil) so, the current is maximum. Since the field produced band. The centre frequency of the BPF is chosen to be 940
by the transmitter coil is directly proportional to current, at Hz with a Q of 9 and gain of 2. [11] This is the last stage
resonance transmitter field will be maximum. filtering before feeding the signal to lock-in amplifier.
 0.1µF
Phase1:
30.47kΩ

+5V
0.1µF 1kΩ
Vin 7.6kΩ
− Vout
1kΩ
+ − Vpsd
100Ω
Vps 1kΩ
−5V +

Fig. 5. Band Pass Filter

1kΩ

F. Lock-In Amplifier

1kΩ
Fig. 8. Equivalent Circuit Phase1

1kΩ
− Vpsd
Vps φ 1kΩ In Fig. 8 phase the subractor acts as noninverting amplifier.
φ̄ + The gain of the circuit is

φ̄
φ 1kΩ
  
R R
Vout = Vin 1+
R+R R
Fig. 6. Lock-in Amplifier  
Vin
= ×2
1) Switching Circuit: The output of the BPF is fed to the 2
switching circuit which is an important part of the lock-in Vout
amplifier.The switches are implemented using CD4066 which = 1
Vin
is an analog switch.

+5V
Phase2:

+12V
10kΩ
Vin +
φ 1kΩ
−
Vref = −5V
Vps 1kΩ
− Vpsd
−12V 1kΩ
φ̄
+

Fig. 7. Reference Clock Generator

1kΩ

2) Reference Clock Generator: [8] The reference clock re-

quired for the switching circuit is generated by Fig.7 circuit. It
consists of a comparator followed by inverter to get actual and Fig. 9. Equivalent Circuit Phase2
complemented reference output. The input of the comparator
is the reference sine wave from oscillator.
3) Subractor: The switches are connected to the subtractor
circuit as per the fig. 6. The operation of the circuit can be In Fig.9 phase the circuit acts as inverting amplifier whose
explained in two phases. gain is -1. So basically this circuit performs multiplication of
reference signal with the received waveform.
 where (
1, if 0 < ωt < π
1kΩ ψ(t) =
−1, if π < ωt < 2π
+5V
1µF  π 
Vin + Z Z2π
1 
Vout = Acos(ωt + φ)d(ωt) + (−cos(ωt + φ))d(ωt)
− 2π
0 π
+5V 2A
= − Sin(φ)
−5V π
So, if we make the output of LPF independent of the amplitude
5kΩ
of received signal we can discriminate the metal. Here we used
op-amp OP27G for implementing the Lowpass filter (Fig.11)
to minimize the offset error to 10µ V.
−5V
H. Control Signal Generator
Fig. 10. Comparator

10kΩ
4) Comparator: [9] The output of subtractor is fed to the
AC coupled comparator to make the output of phase detector
independent of received signal amplitude. The reference input +5V
of the comparator is adjusted to some milli volts such that it From BPF 10kΩ 20kΩ
− 10kΩ
compensates the offset error in opamp. So depending on the
+ +5V
phase difference between input and received signal the duty
cycle of the comparator output changes. Here the comparators −
−5V
are implemented using LM318N (Fig. 10) which is a very high 20kΩ +
speed op-amp.
−5V
G. Lowpass Filter
+5V
1µF
To µC 100Ω −
+ 1µF
+5V
15kΩ
−5V

5kΩ
Vin 15kΩ
− Vout

+ −5V

Fig. 12. Control Signal Generator Circuit

Fig. 11. Low Pass Filter

To remove dependence on magnitude of received signal for

Since the output of comparator is periodic waveform, we phase difference estimation, in addition to the AC coupled
can represent it as sum of sinusoids known as Fourier series. comparator after lockin amplifier, we are checking the phase
The first term represents the DC value and others will be difference only when the magnitude of input signal reaches
sinusoids at frequency f1 , 3f1 ,etc where f1 is the frequency significant value i.e. when the output of the BPF is 1 Vpp . To
of square waveform. So to extract the DC value we can use implement this we precisely full rectify the signal and after
a lowpass with a reasonable low cutoff frequency. Here we low pass filtering we compare it with a pre-defined voltage
chosen the cutoff frequency to be 10Hz. If the received signal such that, we get high output when there input from BPF is
is represented as Acos(ωt+φ), where φ is the phase difference < 1Vpp and low when it is > 1Vpp which is further fed to
between transmitted and received waveform, then the output microcontroller as control signal.
of lowpass filter is
Z2π I. ADC and Micro-controller
1 [5] The final part of the design is displaying the result. It
V0 = Acos(ωt + φ) × ψ(ωt)d(ωt)
2π is done by interfacing ADC [6] to micro-controller 89C5131A
0
using SPI protocol. The results are displayed on 16 × 2 LCD
screen attached to 89C5131A board.

III. R ESULTS

We grounded one end of the instrumentational amplifier

and connected other end to AWG channel to get a small
magnitude sine wave such that the voltage at the input of
Lock-in phase detector is 1Vpp . Now we changed the phase
of the input signal from −45◦ to 70◦ and the reading of LCD
Fig. 14. Offset Drift vs Phase
was plotted against phase Fig. 13. Outside this range we can’t
determine the phase because of the AC coupled comparator
which gives the maximum and minimum duty cycle waveform
in this interval rather than −90◦ to 90◦ . Above process was
repeated thrice. Initially the power supply was kept ON for
1 hr and then all the readings were take for increasing and
decreasing input phase, then power supply was kept ON for 2
more hrs and then finally power supply was OFF for 2 hr. Fig.
13 showes that there is no hystersis. Fig. 14 is plot of Drift
between the second and first and thrid and first obervation. We
seen that there is less than 70 mV of drift. Next we plotted the
percentage error in our LCD reading w.r.t digiral multimeter
reading. We observed maximum error of 6% (Fig. 15).
Now after the above characterization of the circuit we
connected D-shaped coil and cancelled the field at receiver by
adjusting the position of the receiver coil w.r.t to the transmitter
coil. Then various metal was brought on the overlapping area,
which gave different phase for different metals. The observed
phase and along with its conductivity [10] is listed in table I.

Fig. 15. Percentage Error vs Phase

TABLE I
P HASE D IFFERENCE AND C ONDUCTIVITY VS M ETAL

Absolute
Conductivity
LCD (in Phase
Metal (in Mega
mV) Difference (in
S/m)
Deg)
Copper 870 66 58
Aluminium 1163 52 37
Bronze 2520 26 7
Carbon Steel 1640 24 6
Stainless Steel 1771 18 1
Iron
Chromium 1900 8 0.74
Alloy
Fig. 13. Calibration Curve
 techniques with DSP techniques. If we implement the filters
in digital, then range of detection can be increased since
effective noise cancellation algorithms are available in DSP.
Also we can make the PSD output independent of received
signal amplitude by implementing one more PSD circuit with
reference signal are orthogonal to the transmitted waveform
and dividing the two outputs using a micro-controller.
V. F UTURE W ORK
Above idea for discrimination based on phase can be further
be applied to determine the exact composition of any material
and even to estimate its conductivity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We would like to acknowledge Prof. Siddharth Tallur, Varun
Warrier and Maheshwar G. Mangat for there constant support
and ideas to successfully implement our design.
Fig. 16. Absolute Phase Difference and Conductivity vs Metal type
R EFERENCES
[1] https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/other-gadgets/metal-
detector5.htm.
[2] http://www.canadiantreasureseekers.com/index.php?l=product detailp=917.
[3] http://www.garrett.com/hobbysite/hbby searchcoil tech sheet en.aspx.
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnwgf5RrhTg.
[5] http://pdf.datasheetcatalog.com/datasheets2/37/374479 1.pdf
[6] http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/21295C.pdf.
[7] http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ina118.pdf
[8] http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm111-n.pdf
[9] http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm318.pdf
[10] http://www.tibtech.com/conductivity.php
[11] http://www.electronicshub.org/active-band-pass-filter/
[12] http://www.electronics.dit.ie/staff/ypanarin/Lecture

Fig. 17. Absolute Phase Difference vs Conductivity

IV. D ISCUSSIONS
From Fig.16 and Fig.17 we verified our basic assumption
that phase difference is proportional to the conductivity of the
metal. Thus we calibrate our device to discriminate between
metal if we have the conductivity data which is easy avail-
able and are accurate. Once the relation between phase and
conductivity is established we can estimate the conductivity
irrespective of the shape and size of the material. It also
provide a contact-less way of measuring conductivity. Here
we are try to implement every module using analog circuits
as far as possible due to which precision is less when com-
pared to digital techniques. Moreover range of detection and
discrimination can be increased by replacing analog processing
Fig. 18. COMPLETE CIRCUIT DIAGRAM