Circuit for a magnetic subharmonic pulser

THIS PAPER describes a saturable reactor circuit from which pulses of the subharmonic order of the frequency of the applied voltage are produced. The basic idea consists of resetting the flux in the core of a half-wave self-saturating magnetic amplifier by means of a discharge current from a capacitor which has been previously charged during the saturation period. The effect of the discharge current can be adjusted by varying a series resistor so that it will last for a desired number of cycles before the reactor can be saturated again. In this paper, the mechanism of operation of such circuitry is explained and experimental results are given using 60-cycle frequency. The results are partly checked by analysis. This device, because of its simplicity, could be useful as a subharmonic generator or a frequency divider provided that the input frequency is known.