Design and Performance of a Novel Pancake Rogowski Coil for Measuring Pulse Currents

A novel pancake Rogowski coil without magnetic core is introduced in this paper. Owing to its special pancake winding structure, the coil is of low self-resistance and high self-inductance, and thus has excellent low frequency characteristic in the self-integral mode. Moreover, because of its unique installation method, the coil has a flexible sensitivity and can be applied under situations where toroidal air-core Rogowski coils or PCB coils are not available. The parameters and performance of the pancake Rogowski coil are presented, and the principle of shielding is given. Measurements of step pulse current and oscillating pulse current by the coil are studied experimentally to illustrate its good linearity, reliable and flexible sensitivity and excellent frequency characteristic, especially its advantage in low frequency characteristic. The pancake Rogowski coil can be designed to assume round, square or rectangle shape, and has thus broad prospects in its application to the current measurement in such areas as plasma physics and pulsed power technology.