Electric Field Controlling Tunable Magnetoelectric Inductors Based On Multiferroic Composite Materials

Inductors, capacitors and resistors arethree basic passive components for electronic circuits inwhich the inductors play an important role. With the development of science and technology,inductors are having been widely used in a variety of fields, such as aerospace, power electronics,voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs), filters, impedance, matching networks and so on. Thedemand for tunable inductors has been increasing, especially in the wireless communicationsystems and power electronics. Nowadays, the energy and environment problems are severe, so itis necessary to improve the energy utilization ratio and develop environmental protectiontechnology. According to the current situation, the urgent affairs is to develop tunable inductorswhich have large tunability, high quality factor, and lowpower consumption.After collecting the related information on inductors, we presented two kinds of inductorcores creatively, aiming at fabricating inductors and studying the effect of electric field oninductance. In this work, Metglas/PVDF and Metglas/PMN-PT multiferroic composite cores wereemployed. Considering the advantages of layered structure mentioned in many papers, wefabricated the multiferroic composites with layered structure using epoxy glue. Due to themagnetoelectric (ME) coupling effect in this multiferroic composites, the polarization of a materialcan be induced by an applied magnetic field, and the magnetization can also be induced by anapplied electric field, indicating a great potential to fabricate magnetoelectric devices. Up to now,the reportson preparing and controlling electrostatically tunable magnetoelectric inductors are rare,especially for inductors whose cores are made of multiferroic composites. This kind of inductorsare much more energyefficient, fast, lightweight, and less noisy.In this thesis, we studied the effect of some parameters on the inductance including thefrequency, the voltage, the exciting current, different piezoelectric coefficient, and differentmagnetization state. They can all realize the tunability. In the Metglas/PMN-PT multiferroiccomposites, it can be obviously observed that the inductance exhibits a “butterfly” loop as afunction of voltage. The tunability is a little small, but the tunability is obvious, which is closelyrelated to the dielectric property of PMN-PT. In the Metglas/PVDF multiferroic composites, theinductance also exhibits a loop related to the hysteresis loop of PVDF. So the inductance issuccessfullytuned byelectric field. The inductors designed in this thesis can act as a reference for develop novel multifunctionaldevices. The flexible Metglas/PVDF systemcan supplya thinking for flexible electrics.