Analysis and Design of Self-Saturable Magnetic Amplifiers

A self-saturable magnetic amplifier circuit element consisting of a reactor winding in series with a dry-disc rectifier, a resistive load and an ac voltage source is described and analyzed with respect to its operation and design. The results are in the form of curves from which optimum values of power and load resistance can be obtained as a function of the magnetic properties of the core material and the characteristics of the rectifier elements. These curves are used to obtain the best practical design values for complete amplifiers. Several magnetic amplifiers made up of a combination of the basic circuit elements are described in this paper with respect to their use as multistage amplifiers in servomechanisms and other applications.