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01/21/2019: Deviating from the Original Experiment

A project log for Making Sense of the Hall Sense

The Physics Behind The Hall Effect Sensor

therealdubzTheRealDubz 01/21/2019 at 23:450 Comments

There are going to be some differences between my experiment and the original:

  1. use copper, or some other metal clad board/insulator (price is king) for the hall element, not gold leaf
  2. use copper wires, not brass because why brass when there is plenty of copper wire in my lab stock?
  3. wires will be soldered directly to the element which should provide less terminal resistance than using highly polished brass contacts 
  4. use an electro-magnet to generate the B-field with a split-core to place the hall element where the magnet shall have: a) a high permeability core, and b) a small split in the core as thick as the hall element +/- 2mm to minimize reluctance (and loss of flux) in the magnetic
  5. use a better power source, Brunsen cells are somewhat out-of-date
  6. to measure the hall voltage, I'll potentially need a high-precision amplifier and a current sense resistor to make my own galvanometer.

For the Hall element, I'd like to use either 1 oz or 0.5 oz copper clad board since minimizing thickness is key.  In Hall's paper, he stated that even using a strip of copper that 9cm x 2cm x 250um (that's micrometers, 10-6  meters) would fail to yield a detectable transverse voltage.  However, this could have been due to the limitations of the equipment he was using at the time.  

I'll  have to do some more research as to the reason for this, but it may still be worth a shot to try the 1oz or 0.5oz copper since their thickness is significantly less than 250um, 30um down to ~17um respective to the copper clad weight.

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