Using a Single Toroidal Sample to Determine the Intrinsic Complex Permeability and Permittivity of Mn–Zn Ferrites

Analysis of the principle of the published lumped circuit methods for determination of the intrinsic complex permeability and permittivity of the Mn-Zn ferrites reveals that as long as the electric and the magnetic field distributions in the core(s) in two measurements are different, the two intrinsic values can be determined. Using this principle, we developed a set of general lumped circuit methods based on a toroidal Mn-Zn ferrite core as the measurement sample. We examined two possible different excitation modes: magnetic field excitation and electric field excitation. The two different excitation modes result in significantly different field distributions in the sample. Thus, high accuracy can be guaranteed in principle. For the magnetic field excitation, we present in this paper a general finite-difference method to solve the fields in the core and the impedance of the ferrite core inductor. To avoid the stray capacitance among the coils of the ferrite core winding inductor in the measurement, we made a set of short-ended coaxial test fixtures. We performed experiments to determine the intrinsic complex permeability and permittivity of a Mn-Zn ferrite core up to 10 MHz by using the two general methods and validated the measured intrinsic values experimentally.