Development of an Experimental Setup for Open Core Optical Current Transducers

Summary

Optical current transducers have clear advantages over conventional current trans-formers and can be used specially for high current measurement in high power laboratories. But proper construction of these devices is not straightforward since several factors influence the accuracy of these devices. To better understand the optical current transducer performance, experimental setups are of great importance. This paper focuses on the development of exper-imental setups for studying open core optical current transducer performances under AC and DC excitations. The first setup is a DC setup which uses a polarization analyzer. This design benefits from an optical table for adjustment. The second setup addresses a DC setup which uses an extra linear polarizer and a photodiode instead of the polarization analyzer. The second layout uses an optical cage and can be used on its own. These two setups use a magnetic core to generate sufficient magnetic field. In the third one, the iron core is omitted and the winding is fed with AC current. An amplifier is designed in the last two setups to reinforce the output signal. The experimental results for a Quartz cylinder as a magneto-optical material are reported in the paper. All the results show the linearity between the flowing current and output signal and prove the correct function of the setups. The constructed setups can be used in the future to investigate the behavior of the optical current transducers under different circumstances.

Additional informations

Authors

Kumm Thomas, Shayegani Akmal, Mohseni Hossein