Brown University

Department of Physics

Physics 6 Spring 2006

A SIMPLE FLUXGATE MAGNETOMETER

1 Introduction
A simple fluxgate magnetometer can be constructed out available equipment in the lab. It can easily
measure the magnetic field of the earth .You will need the following equipment: (1) A function
generator,( 2) an oscilloscope, (3) Pasco waveform analyzer, (4) a Thorton amplifier ,(5) a spool
of magnet wire, and (6) 1 meter of 18 gauge stovepipe wire( iron wire that becomes magnetically
saturated at low magnetic fields).

2 Procedure

A) Build the sense/drive coils.

Wrap the magnet wire uniformly around the stovepipe wire (this is the excitation coil); you
should have the same number of turns per unit length throughout the length of the stovepipe wire.
The magnet wire windings need to be uniform for best results. After you wind the magnet wire
around the stovepipe wire bend the stove pipe wire in half (the stovepipe wire bends easily). You
should now have a U shaped device (see figure 1). Now you need to wrap some more magnet wire
around the U shaped device, this will be the sense coil. Again try to make the windings uniform. A
sample sense/drive coil is available in the lab that you can model your own design after.

B) Assemble the fluxgate magnetometer.

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 Connect the function generator, waveform analyzer, amplifier, and oscilloscope as shown in the
schematic in figure 2. Set the function generator to a triangle wave of 1000 Hz. Set the wave form
analyzer to the band pass filter and set the band pass filter to 2000 Hz .Set the amplifier to an
amplification of 30. Turn on the oscilloscope and adjust it to find the 2000 Hz signal. What you
have done is to filter out the second harmonic of the sense coil; this second harmonic is remarkably
sensitive to small changes in the magnetic field. Orient the sensor along direction of the earths
magnetic field (You can use a dip needle and/or compass to find the earths magnetic field), you will
see the sine wave increase in magnitude, the amplitude of the sine wave (the second harmonic) is
proportional to the magnetic field. You can bring a small bar magnet towards the sensor, you will
again see the sine wave displayed on the oscilloscope increase in magnitude. You can calibrate your
magnetometer by making a known magnetic field with a pair of Helmholtz coils. The magnetic field
in the center of a pair of Helmholtz coils of diameter d separated by a distance d/2 is given by the
following formula:

µ0 N I
B= √ (1)
(5 5d)

Where N= the number of turns of wire on the coil, µ0 is the magnetic permeability of free space
=4π × 10−7mT /A, and I is the current in the coils. By placing the sense coil in the center of the
Helmholtz coils and measuring the peak to peak amplitude of the second harmonic displayed on the
oscilloscope for a known magnetic field you can calibrate your fluxgate magnetometer to measure
unknown magnetic fields.

3 Theory of Operation
If you successfully built the fluxgate magnetometer and measured some small magnetic fields and
convinced yourself that the device actually works you probably quite naturally will wonder how it

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works. The answer requires a combination of different parts of electromagnetic theory and mathe-
matics including Faradays law of induction, the physics of magnetic materials, and Fourier series.1
The operation will be explained briefly (for this particular design) as follows, for more complete
descriptions see some of the references listed below. You will get a glimpse of the cleverness that
many physicists and engineers employ in making/designing scientific equipment. The essential idea
in this fluxgate magnetometer is to saturate the iron nickel wire with the excitation coil, when
you place the wire in a small external magnetic field one part of the U shaped device will saturate
faster than the part opposing the magnetic field. The net magnetic induction will have fundamental
frequency twice that of the external magnetic field along with higher even harmonics. This net
voltage detected by the sense coil (some pulses) will be asymmetric and by Fourier analysis will
consist of only even harmonics. A suitable filter can select out the second harmonic which will be
proportional to the external (or bias) field.
When we apply a periodic triangular voltage across the excitation coil this will cause a large
magnetic field to be generated in the iron wire, so large that field will saturate in the iron wire, by
Faradays law a voltage will be generated in the sense coil given by:

dI dBExcitation dBEarth
VSEN SE = −L ∝( + ) (2)
dt dt dt

where L is the mutual inductance of the pair of coils. A graph of the B field (in the upper wire
in the U shaped device) and the voltage induced in the sense coil (from the upper wire in the U
shaped device) is shown in figure 3. As you can plainly see the bottom curve (Voltage versus time)
is proportional to the time derivative of the top curve (Magnetic Induction versus time).In a zero
magnetic field, the magnetic induction and voltage induced in the sense coil by the bottom part of
the U shaped device will be the mirror image (with respect to the time axis) of the graphs in figure
3 (if you wound the coil around the iron wire evenly and symmetrically).Hence in a zero external
magnetic field the sense coil should pick up no induced voltage since VU pper + VLower ≈ 0 .When
we place the detector in an external magnetic field (e.g. the Earths magnetic field), the situation
is now different. In this case the magnetic induction (B) in the coil will saturate asymmetrically in
time, it will produce the waveform in figure 4. Notice that the magnetic induction B saturates more
quickly when the magnetic induction is in the same direction as the external magnetic field (the
magnetic field you are trying to measure) compared to when the magnetic induction opposes the
external field. As you clearly see the in figure 4, the flat parts of the magnetic induction (B) versus
time curve is longer in the upper half of the graph and shorter in the bottom half of the graph.
The net voltage detected by the sense coil from the sum of the upper and bottom cores of your
fluxgate magnetometer when it is placed in an external magnetic field will be a series of asymmetric
pulses, something like figure 5 (for further details see reference 1). As mentioned earlier these pulses
will have a strong second harmonic component which can be filtered out and measured with the
waveform analyzer and oscilloscope. In your report you should carefully document how you built
your magnetometer, explain clearly how it works, calibration procedures, and record and compare
any magnetic fields you measured with some of the commercial magnetic sensors (Pasco, Rawson-
Lush) available in the lab. How does your magnetometer stack up against the competition?
1 If you havent learned about Fourier series yet, they were discovered by Joseph Fourier and used extensively

in his theory of heat flow. Basically any periodic function (e.g. the triangle wave
P generated by the function gen-
erator) can be represented as an infinite series of sines and cosines, y(x) = (an )sin(nx) + (bn )cos(nx) where
R 2π R 2π
an = y(x)sin(nx)dx and bn = y(x)cos(nx)dx.
0 0

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 Question: The waveform analyzer uses a notch filter to effectively filter out the second harmonic,
write down the circuit for a band pass filter and derive its spectral response (see any good electronics
book) . What values of resistance and capacitance would you need to make a 2000 Hz filter?

The Pasco waveform analyzer allows you select several types of filters and select various frequen-
cies , you could in principle set the function generator to 10,000 Hz (or higher) and filter out the
20,000 Hz second harmonic. By Faradays law (equation 2) the induced voltage will be greater (since
it depends on a time derivative) and hence more easily detected. At higher frequencies however you
will run into (at least) 2 problems, the skin depth of the iron wire will become a factor and electronic
filter design will become more challenging because at high frequencies resistors also have inductance
and capacitance, capacitors also have resistance and inductance, etc. which must be accounted for.

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 Question: What is the skin depth of a metal? (See e.g. J. Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics
or google metallic skin depth). At what frequencies might it be a problem? Why? Warning you are
starting to do some engineering!
Another approach to improving the sensitivity of the magnetometer would be to replace the
notch filter with a circuit that blocks out the first harmonic and is resonant at the second harmonic
( See the Amateur Radio Handbook for examples of such circuits). Sensitivity can be pushed even
father by using what is called phase sensitive detection, this is a method (used by lock-in amplifiers)
that allows one to pull weak signals out a noisy environment (See Keithley application notes on the
lock-in amplifier or google phase sensitive detection).
Extra Credit: Explain how phase sensitive detection works (You will learn about this in more
advanced physics and engineering lab courses).

4 Magnetic Properties of the Ferromagnetic Wire

Your fluxgate magnetometer uses iron wire of low magnetic coercivity as one its key elements of
operation. In this section we explain a few properties of magnetic materials necessary to understand
its operation. There are several types of magnetism (paramagnetic, diamagnetic and ferromag-
netic).The fluxgate magnetometer uses the ferromagnetic properties of the iron wire to work. Any
ferromagnetic metal will exhibit nonlinear behavior known as hysteresis. When you apply a mag-
netic field to a ferromagnetic material (such as iron) you will find that the magnetic induction in
the material will at first increase linearly and then saturate at some external field, when you then
reverse the field and try to demagnetize the iron, the magnetic induction in the iron will decrease
but not retrace the original curve, you will get something like the hysteresis curve in figure 6. Hys-
teresis occurs because the iron wire consists of many small magnetic domains, each domain with
a magnetic moment pointing in a random direction. By applying an external magnetic field and
magnetizing the iron wire you will cause the magnetic domains to align along the applied external
magnetic field. The irreversibility of the magnetic domain alignment is the cause of the hysteresis
and by the laws of thermodynamics heat will be created and energy lost. Hysteresis is a problem

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for certain applications (e.g. transformer design) but in the fluxgate magnetometer application we
are cleverly using it to our advantage. For more introductory information about magnetic materials
and magnetic fields in matter see reference 6.
In summary, if you successfully built a fluxgate magnetometer congratulations! Fluxgate magne-
tometers were first built in World War 2 for submarine and mine detection, NASA has used fluxgate
magnetometers on probes to accurately measure magnetic fields of our moon and several planets in
our solar system. Reference 2 lists several other types of magnetometers (SQUID,Hall effect,etc.)
and their theory of operation along with the fluxgate magnetometer. For some recent articles on
cutting edge magnetometers see references 7 and 8.

5 References
1.)Fluxgate Magnetometry, R. Noble, Electronics World + Wireless World (Sept. 1991) vol. 97, p.
726-32.
2.) A Review of Magnetic Sensors, J.E. Lenz, Proc. IEEE 78(6) 1990 p.973.
3.) Recent Advances in Fluxgate Magnetometry, D.I. Gordon, R.E. Brown, IEEE Trans. Magnetics
v. MAG-8,1,1972 p. 76-82
4.) Earths Field Magnetometry, W.F. Stuart, Reports on Progress in Physics, 1972, vol. 35, p.
803-881.
5.) Magnetic Measurements Handbook, J.M. Janicke, Magnetic Research Press 2nd edition 1997.
6.) Electricity and Magnetism ,E. Purcell, McGraw Hill 2nd edition 1985, p 397-450.
7.) Novel Medical Imaging Shows Promise ,Charles Day, Physics Today, 58(9) p. 21-22.
8.) Atom Based Detector Puts New Twist on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Adrian Cho, Science 25
March 2005, 307: 1855.