Working on the possible elementary effects involved in the Coler device, I needed to wind a small coil of 110 turns around an iron wire 7cm long, insulated with green plastic. The iron wire diameter is 1 mm and the outer diameter of the coil is 2 mm. It's very small (see below). The goal was to test possible anomalies when there is a current both in the coil and in the iron wire. I noticed nothing abnormal. Then I decided to use the coil as a detector of possible signals when a current passes through the iron wire, therefore I connected the coil to a sound card. There was shot noise of unknown origin. After many tests not yet ended, it seems that the problem came either from the sound card (a bit surprising because I had the same problem with two sound cards), or from the long cable connecting the coil to the sound card. So to avoid this problem, I decided to add a microphone preamp at the end of the cable, and then to connect the coil with a shorter cable to the audio preamp. This way the preamp adds a sufficient gain to make the shot noise negligible in comparison with possible coils signals. Here are the coil and the preamp: After that, I led miscellaneous tests, including one with a neodynium magnet. At this step I noticed strong noises when I moved the magnet near the coil, at about 10 cm, even very slowly. Obviously it was the Barkhausen effect. I was surprised that I could get a so strong effect with such a little coil. Then I tried with a big coil with a big iron core and got only very poor results. It seems that using a thin iron core is much better than a big one. So this post is to share this information. It can be useful to know it, because if the Barkhausen effect is improved this way, it's possibly due to a best "cooperation" of magnetic domains when the volume is thin and/or to a best coupling with the tightly winded coil. Thus other devices with magnetic coils could perhaps be improved by the same way (for example by replacing a coil with a large core by the same volume of small coils with thin core). Here is the Adobe Audition screen shot of the Barkhausen noise: There are disturbances from the mains (50Hz and harmonics), visible in the horizontal lines. The Barhausen noise occupies all the spectrum that I had limited to 3 Khz in this test. The MP3 is in the attached file.
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