Residence time difference (RTD) fluxgate sensor is a potential device to measure the DC or low-frequency magnetic field in the time domain. Nevertheless, jitter noise and magnetic noise severely affect the detection result. A novel post-processing algorithm for jitter noise reduction of RTD fluxgate output strategy based on the single-frequency time difference (SFTD) method is proposed in this study to boost the performance of the RTD system. This algorithm extracts the signal that has a fixed frequency and preserves its time-domain information via a time⁻frequency transformation method. Thereby, the single-frequency signal without jitter noise, which still contains the ambient field information in its time difference, is yielded. Consequently, compared with the traditional comparator RTD method (CRTD), the stability of the RTD estimation (in other words, the signal-to-noise ratio of residence time difference) has been significantly boosted with sensitivity of 4.3 μs/nT. Furthermore, the experimental results reveal that the RTD fluxgate is comparable to harmonic fluxgate sensors, in terms of noise floor.
Keywords: RTD fluxgate; noise reduction algorithm; time–frequency transformation.