ELECTRODEPOSITION OF GIANT MAGNETOSTRICTIVE TRANSDUCERS FOR A FABRICATED MIXED PHYSICS SIGNAL TRANSMISSION DEVICE
Mina Faltas · UNM’s Digital Repository (University of New Mexico) · 2023
Non-intrusive solutions for communication through a sealed metal vessel requires the use of piezoelectric transducers to transmit acoustic waves through the vessel wall. This approach suffers the disadvantage of compromised security because a potential eavesdropper could decipher the correlation between digital and electric signals of both sides of the system. One solution is a mixed physics system employing magnetostrictive transducers. For a magnetostrictive transducer to work well in this application, it would have to have a high piezomagnetic constant. This is influenced by soft magnetism and saturation magnetostriction. Nickel-Iron-Cobalt alloys are modified to retain their soft magnetic properties while increasing their magnetostriction to serve as an improvement over the performance of the baseline magnetostrictive material in the simulated and fabricated mixed physics device. Further synthesis aims to reduce eddy current losses of the material through the incorporation of phosphorus and controlling the material’s microstructure through electrodeposition under magnetic fields.