With its stability and linearity, PowerSense’s cutting edge sensor technology is setting new standards for current measurements in general. For PowerSense’s primary business area of MV grid monitoring in particular, it is creating a completely new set of standards for how to monitor the MV power grid.

The DISCOS^® Current Sensor is part of the DISCOS^® Opti module. The DISCOS^® Optical Sensor monitors the current size and angle on both the LV and MV side of the transformer.

The DISCOS^® Current Sensor is based on the Faraday effect principles.

Today, only a few applications in measuring instruments are based on the Faraday rotation principle. For instance, the Faraday effect has been used for measuring optical rotatory power, for amplitude modulation of light, and for remote sensing of magnetic fields.

However, due to advanced computing techniques, PowerSense now offers a low-priced optical sensor based on the Faraday effect.

Here is how it works!

The relation between the angle of rotation of the polarization and the magnetic field in a diamagnetic material is: β = v B d, where:

• β is the angle of rotation (in radians).
• v is the Verdet constant for the material. This empirical proportionality constant (in units of radians per tesla per meter) varies with wavelength and temperature and is tabulated for various materials.
• B is the magnetic flux density in the direction of propagation (in tesla).
• d is the length of the path (in meter) where the light and magnetic field interact.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_effect