A New Faraday Rotation Measurement Method for the Study on Magneto Optical Property of PbO-Bi<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>-B<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> Glasses for Current Sensor Applications

Abstract

MAGNETO-OPTICAL current transformers (MOCT) based on the Faraday Effect provide numerous advantages over the conventional transformers. However the commonly used materials in MOCT are crystals that are very expensive and temperature dependence thus will cause many problems for the output signal. Cost efficient diamagnetic PbO-Bi2O3-B2O3 (PBB) glass system is fabricated in this study, for the aim of obtaining a good candidate glass with high verdet constant and good temperature resistance to replace crystals. A home-made optical bench was setup, calibrated and used for measuring the verdet constant of the fabricated glasses. Glass with composition of 50%PbO-40%Bi2O3-10%B2O3 in mol showed high Verdet constant (0.1533 min/Gauss.cm) and good value of the figure of merit (0.02635 min/Gauss), which can be considered as the ideal candidate for MOCT applications.