A Labview based Measuring System for Hysteresis Loops of Magnetic Materials

Magnetic materials exhibit varied hysteresis behaviour at different operating conditions. The exact determination of magnetic characteristics requires an accurate measurement setup. A low cost high performance digital hysteresis loop tracer has been built to measure magnetic characteristics of ferromagnetic materials under controlled sinusoidal and non-sinusoidal flux density waveforms. A digital feedback program is developed in LabVIEW to trace hysteresis characteristics using measured voltages and currents. In this paper, magnetic characteristics and losses of Grain-oriented (GO) silicon steel and ferrite materials are obtained at different frequencies. Losses determined by calculating the area under the hysteresis loop are compared with measurements from a power analyzer. The proposed experimental setup can be used to characterize different materials at various frequencies.