An overview of commercially available Teslameters for applications in modern science and industry

Abstract

The Hall-effect based Teslameters (also called Gaussmeters) are the mostly applied instruments for measuring DC and AC magnetic flux densities in modern science and industry. This paper gives an overview of commercially available Teslameters at the high-end performance level. The Teslameters have been evaluated by following characteristics that are published by suppliers: probe dimensions, magnetic field sensitive volume, accuracy, magnetic resolution, measurement range, frequency bandwidth, temperature coefficient sensitivity, and price/performance ratio.

The Teslameter that best matches the measurement needs in various application fields incorporates a 3-axis integrated Hall probe, analog electronics based on the spinning-current technique, an analog-to-digital converter, an embedded computer, and a touch-screen display. The 3-axis Hall probe is a single silicon chip integrating both horizontal and vertical Hall magnetic sensors and a temperature sensor. The spinning-current eliminates most of the Hall probe offset, low-frequency noise, and the planar Hall voltage. The errors due to the Hall sensor non-linearity and the variations in the probe and electronics temperatures are eliminated by a calibration procedure. The errors due to the angular imperfections of the Hall probe are eliminated by a calibration of the sensitivity tensor of the probe. This Teslameter can measure magnetic field vectors from about 100 nT to 30 T, with the spatial resolution of 100 µm, magnetic resolution ±2 ppm of the range, the accuracy 0.002 % of the range, a temperature coefficient less than 5 ppm/°C, and angular errors less than 0.1°.