Design of a Low-Consumption Fluxgate Transducer for High-Current Measurement Applications

This paper presents the design and final realization of a transducer system for the measurement of high dc and ac currents. This transducer is based on the magnetic flux compensation technique, also called fluxgate principle. The transducer designed can measure currents of around 1 kA of peak value with a 170-kHz small-signal bandwidth. This functionality can be achieved with low power consumption if the designed system is compared with other fluxgate transducers available on the market and with similar functional specifications. Improvement in consumption was achieved by the inclusion in the design of a switching power supply (based on flyback topology) and a switched amplifier for generating magnetic flux compensation current (based on half-bridge inverter topology).