Amorphous force transducers in ac applications

The high stress sensitivity and high yield stress properties of amorphous ribbon materials make them suitable for magnetic sensors and tranducer applications. Recently the authors have shown that ac systems eliminate the offset voltage and drift problems of the previously published dc systems. Further investigations proved that these transducers could be operated with a linear characteristic up to 1000 g in multiwrap toroidal configurations. The cause of the transducing behavior of the materials was proved to be variation of permeability with stress. It was previously suggested that the optimum operating frequency of the ac transducers is dependent on the physical configuration of the core. Further investigations have shown that the optimum operating frequency is linearly dependent on the amplitude of the input signal to the transducer. Double-core systems have been previously described in the literature where one core acts as a dummy core and the force is applied to the active core. The disadvantage of the double-core system is that aging of the active core changes the performance of the transducer by as much as 10%. A new system will be presented which uses an accurate analog memory to reduce the ageing effect to a fraction of one percent.