Team 2210 has been tasked by Electric Boat to design and build a MEMs magnetometer capable of detecting magnetic fields with intensities as small as 0.1 nT in 3 Axis of direction. This project involves designing and developing three orthogonal fluxgates to detect all the cartesian coordinates. The fluxgate requires a driving circuit capable of supplying a square wave to drive the drive coil. The drive coil is wrapped around and through a toroidal ferrite core. The purpose of this coil is to saturate the core in the clockwise direction and then counterclockwise direction very quickly. When no external magnetic field is present, both core halves will saturate simultaneously, leaving a net-zero flux within the system. However, when an external magnetic field is present, the halves of the core will begin to saturate at slightly different times, leaving a nonzero magnetic flux within the core. By wrapping a sense coil entirely around the core, we can induce a current in this coil that is proportional to the external magnetic field. This signal will be processed in MATLAB with a bandpass filter and lock-in amplifier to extract the noise within the system. This device will be inserted into a metal container created by the joint ME team.

Our team collaborated with Mechanical Engineering 21 on this project.