Electronic – Sending data over a magnetic field

A simple model to help you visualize: The magnetic flux forms loops, you cannot have a magnetic field line terminate on nothing in free space. That means that all those flux lines inside the solenoid heading (for example) to the right. The flux line must continue outside the solenoid and loop around to join the other end of the flux loop. In doing so it heads to the left. No external flux lines -> no flux.

So what could be the issue?

1) In an infinite solenoid, there is no external magnetic field. One example of this is a Tokamak or toroidal solenoid. Like a big doughnut. The flux lines form loops within the doughnut and have no need to go outside. - of course a mathematically ideal infinite solenoid could have been what they were discussing, in which case the field lines loop around infinity. Hard to test though.

2) The flux density outside of the linear finite solenoid is much less than inside. So while there may be X flux across the throat of the solenoid that same amount of flux (X) is spread out over a much much larger cross sectional area. The density is much less. [here the area is the cross sectional area across the solenoid.]

3) Perhaps they are talking about a shielded solenoid? This would involve having a high permittivity material external to the coils to trap the flux lines.

H is the driving force in coils and is ampere turns per metre where the metre part is the length of the magnetic circuit. In a transformer it's easy to determine this length because 99% of the flux is contained in the core. A coil with an air core is difficult as you might imagine.

I think of B as a by-product of H and B is made bigger by the permeability of the core.

In electrostatics, E (electric field strength) is the equivalent of H (magnetic field strength) and it's somewhat easier to visualize. Its units are volts per metre and also gives rise to another quantity, electric flux density (D) when multiplied by the permittivity of the material in which it exists: -

\$\dfrac{B}{H} = \mu_0\mu_R\$ and

\$\dfrac{D}{E} = \epsilon_0\epsilon_R\$

Regarding ferrite data sheets, the BH curve is the important one - it tells you the permeability of the material and this directly relates to how much inductance you can get for one turn of wire.

It will also indicate how much energy could be lost when reversing the magnetic field - this of course will always happen when ac driven - not all the domains in the ferrite return to produce an average of zero magnetism when the current is removed and when reversing the current the remaining domains need to be neutralized before the core magnetism goes negative - this requires a small amount of energy on most ferrites and gives rise to the term hysteresis loss.

Other important graphs in a ferrite data sheet are the permeability versus frequency graph and permeability versus temperature.

From personal experience of having designed a few transformers, I find them tortuous in that I never seem to naturally remember anything other than the basics each time I begin a new design and this is annoying - in this answer I had to double check everything except the units of H!