Flux Gate Magnetometer

This report presents a magnetometer designed to detect vehicles in optically and thermally obscured environments. Due to the ferromagnetic properties of materials used in the construction of vehicles, vehicles perturb the Earth’s magnetic field. The magnetometer senses these perturbations through electromagnetic induction. Signal processing techniques are employed to harness and amplify actual signal from environmental noise. The design, layout, physics, principles of operation, performance characteristics and limitations are theoretically and experimentally discussed in this paper. We found that the transfer characteristics are extremely non-linear and the device is limited by Johnson noise.

This research was undertaken as part of Carnegie Mellon University's Spring 2012 Sensor System Design course.