electronic and electrical components etc.

[PG1995]

Thank you, MrAl, KISS.

I will take apart that thing soon.

KISS, thanks a lot for the offer but I'm not in the US. I believe that I need to buy an LCR meter.

Best wishes
PG

 

[PG1995]

Hi

It has got eight terminals which would mean four sets of windings.

Don't you think by connecting the terminals a single winding can be formed and it could work as a regular inductor?

Regards
PG

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

Sure. Use as many as you want, one, two or three. Just phase them right. I suppose that they will add/subtract. In theory, they would.

 

[PG1995]

Thanks.

Perhaps, you had thought that I was thinking of connecting individuals inductors, #1, #2, and #3 together in series. I was only talking about #1 and connecting its four terminals on each side into a single terminal.

 

[MrAl]

Hi,

Well how you use them is a little tricky.

If you connect the windings that have the same number of turns in parallel, you end up with one winding that can handle more current, but the saturation level does not go up. If you connect them in series however, the current handling stays the same but the inductance goes up and unfortunately it gets easier to saturate.

This other consideration is the saturation level of the inductor. The inductance goes up by roughly the square of the turns ratio, but the inductor saturates based on the number of turns times the current (N*I). So when we increase the number of turns (adding windings in series) we make it N times easier to saturate. Basically what this means is the saturation level has to be checked as well as the inductance, but then you have to do that anyway. There are ways to improve this, but it usually means creating an air gap in the core and that's hard to do with toroid cores without very special machinery, and although the air gap raises the saturation current handling ability it lowers the inductance dramatically. The way this is usually handled is since the inductance goes up with the square of the turns (N^2) and the saturation level goes up with the number of turns (N alone) and the inductance goes down with the air gap length (Lg) and the ease of saturation goes up down with the air gap length (Lg), by increasing the number of turns and increasing the gap length eventually we reach an acceptable level of inductance that does not saturate too soon, provided we have enough room on the core. This also means that at some point the core size may have to be increased because we cant fit the required number of turns of the required wire diameter on the core after increasing the number of turns.

Those things look cool once they are removed from the board