On the low-frequency electromagnetic responses of in-line metal detectors to metal contaminants

This paper considers a dipole solution to the low-frequency electromagnetic responses of a typical in-line metal detector to metal contaminants. This solution is determined by the characteristics of metal targets and incident magnetic fields, which are treated separately as two independent factors. For the metal targets, the responses of sphere and wire samples are determined. The electromagnetic polarizability matrix of a metal sphere is directly computed from a spherical response function. The electromagnetic polarizability tensor of metal wire is derived from a measured eigenvalue matrix and a rotation matrix. The approximated responses of sphere and wire samples from the proposed solutions agree well with the measured responses from in-line metal detectors. In theory, the approximation method on metal wire samples is also applicable to the metal contaminants of other shapes. © 2014 IEEE.