About  AMORPHOUS CORES

INTRODUCTION

The amorphous metal is an alloy with a glass like atomic structure:   A non-crystalline frozen liquid.    Amorphous alloys ribbons are produced by rapid     solidification of   molted metals at cooling rates of about a million degrees  centigrade per second.   The alloys solidify before the atoms have a chance to  segregate or crystallize.    A variety of  different alloys are available to meet the vide  ranging  needs of magnetic designers.   The properties of magnetic ribbons vary  from alloy to alloy.

General properties of Amorphous Alloy Tape

• High permeability and low coercive force
• Low core loss and low exciting power
• Good temperature stability (working temperature -50°C ~ +130°C)
 Typical applications of Iron Based Amorphous Alloy Tape:
• Smooth current wave filters and PFC inductors
• Differential inductors in switch-model power supply
• Video and audio application.
• Single phase and three phase transformer cores
• Power switch transformer cores

Typical applications of Cobal Based Amorphous Alloy Tape:

• Magnetic amplifiers, noise suppressors, pulse transformer cores
• Differential inductors in switch-model power supply and common mode cores
• Transformer cores of high frequency power switch (30kHz~200kHz)
• Output filters and energy inductors

Disadvantages:

• expensive
• very hard material
• gives sharp particles during production


Two approaches to Amorphous cores

1) The  technical approach.  For that you need to know and understand what the hysteresis of a transformer material is doing to the signal transfer.  This is the higher permeability, lower coercive force, low core loss and low exciting power.  Also the shape of the hysteresis curvce is more linear,  more square shaped.   This gives a compley mix of new electrical parameters to amorphous cores,  compared to normal steel cores.  

2) The listener's approach.  Decide for yourself what sound you prefer.  With today's modern core materials,  amorphous cores are appreciated by "connaisseurs" of tube sound. Before that,  there was already the use of this material for some high end moving coils transformers.       Theoretically Amorphous material has a fraction higher distortion, but practically the sound is preferred by many.     Most comments are like this:

• more realistic sound picture
• more natural sound
• less listening to "the transfomer"
Whatever approach may be right,  for sure is, that despite the higher price,  there is a fast, very fast  growing interest in these products! 

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