The fluxgate mechanism, part I: The gating curves of parallel and orthogonal fluxgates

Abstract

A review of various types of fluxgate sensors is given and they are divided into two major groups, parallel-and orthogonal-gated fluxgates. A theory for parallel and for orthogonal gating is presented and the gating characteristics for the two cases are calculated from measured <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B-H</tex> curves. The theory is verified by a close fit to the experimentally derived curves and finally a general expression for the output voltage from the two types of fluxgates is presented.