Hi again Bronco,
Well i have to apologize for that oversight, what happened was i was pressed for time and had to quickly look over a number of threads both here and in another forum. But had i seen it previously, i would have complemented you and i'll get to that next where i'll have to complement you now
As you probably know by now, the window area in a core is pretty much as important as anything else about the core, like material type, center leg cross sectional area, etc. If you fill the window up with winding turns, you've reached a certain limit of the core where you just cant add any more turns, period, and that is a severe limit.
That brings us to your 'old' configuration with one coil versus your 'new' config with two coils on the outer two legs.
The old config had one coil, and turns from that coil simultaneously fill up BOTH windows as each turn is added. The new config though is different in that each turn of an outer winding only fills up ONE window. That means you can fit twice as many turns on the core because you have two windows.
The drawback is that the area of each outer leg is only half of the inner leg, so it would saturate more easily. But given the large coincidental air gap, it is very doubtful if this core could ever saturate unless you get extremely unlucky and happen to have to pick up some material that is made for transformers (that is, has a relatively low reluctance). In that case the core may saturate, but that is probably going to be very rare, and also the mating surface of this unlucky metal would have to be near perfectly flat to match that of the core metal itself.
So lots of applause and hats off to your new configuration, and if you care to you can do some careful testing to see how much stronger it is with the two windings instead of the one single in the center. This of course assumes that each outer leg has the same number of turns as the inner core had before the change in config. If they have half the number of turns as the center leg had, there's not much difference.
Also, the strength may be a little more than twice with the two windings because the total reluctance will be slightly less.
Hey do i get a prize for the 100th post in this thread?