A Triaxial Orthogonal Fluxgate Magnetometer Made of a Single Magnetic Wire With Three U-Shaped Branches

A triaxial orthogonal magnetometer head is presented in this paper. The head is constructed using a single piece of an amorphous wire. The wire is bent into three mutually orthogonal U-shaped branches on each of which a pickup coil is wound. The performance of the proposed head is evaluated in comparison to that of a triaxially assembled sensor head by using three separate uniaxial fluxgate heads. The input-output characteristics of each channel and the cross-talk effect are investigated. A simple calibration method is shown to decrease the cross-talk effect and to improve the orthogonality of the single wire head. Noise level is evaluated for both heads