A Simple Magnetostatic Sensing Method for Assessing the Local Hysteresis Properties in Ferromagnetic Sheet Materials.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Sensors Volume 2012, Article ID 870916, 7 pages doi:10.1155/2012/870916 Research Article A Simple Magnetostatic Sensing Method for Assessing the Local Hysteresis Properties in Ferromagnetic Sheet Materials Ivan J. Garshelis1 and Guillaume Crevecoeur2 1 Magnova, Inc., 17 Downing Three, Pittsfield, MA 01201, USA 2 Department Electrical Energy, Systems and Automation, Ghent University, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium Correspondence should be addressed to Ivan J. Garshelis, ijgarsh@ and Guillaume Crevecoeur, guillaume.crevecoeur@ugent.be Received 4 November 2011; Accepted 8 March 2012 Academic Editor: Lalita Udpa Copyright © 2012 I. J. Garshelis and G. Crevecoeur. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Global hysteretic properties of electrical steels can be measured using ring or strip samples, while the assessment of the local hysteretic properties is a much more difficult task since the measurement method needs to be very sensitive. This paper presents a new method wherein the intensity and spatial distribution of the magnetic field, arising from large gradients in the local magnetization, are measured. These large gradients are induced by the passage of a test sample through the steep gradient field of a small, proximate permanent magnet. Magnetic field measurements during both directions of motion provide information indicative of the hysteresis properties. We theoretically analyze these measurements and show experimentally that the measurements correlate well with al