Compensation of the thermal drift in the sensitivity of fundamental-mode orthogonal fluxgates

A method is suggested that reduces the temperature coefficient of the sensitivity of fundamental-mode orthogonal fluxgates by an order of magnitude. For the background magnetic fields greater than 20 μT, the method provides even better reduction, down to 100 ppm°C, which is comparable with the temperature coefficient of conventional parallel-type fluxgates operated in closed-loop configuration. The fluxgate prototype has demonstrated a 20-fold reduction of the thermal drift in its sensitivity. The suggested method is solely based on the processing of signals generated by fundamental-mode orthogonal fluxgates in open-loop configuration and does not require any additional hardware. This makes the open-loop fundamental-mode orthogonal fluxgates competitive with closed-loop parallel-type ones in terms of both resolution and accuracy, while still keeping them simpler than the parallel fluxgates.