Introduction

You can find a metal detector at airports, theaters and various other public places.
They are used for the safety of people to detect anyone carrying a metal (Arms etc). In
this project we are going to design a simple metal detector circuit. we are going to
design a simple metal detector circuit using 555 Timer IC.
Theory
Inductors are nothing but coils of enameled copper wire comes in different shapes
and sizes. Based on various parameters the inductance of an inductor is calculated.
In all of those parameters we are basically interested in core on the inductor as
depending on the core, inductance value changes drastically.
In the figure below you can see the air cored inductors, In these inductors there will
be no solid core. They are basically coils left in air. The medium of flow of magnetic
field generated by inductor is nothing or air. These inductors have inductances of
very less value.

When inductor coil is wound on a core may be ferrite or an iron core, the inductance
of the coil increases enormously. This value is much more than the air cored one of
the same size and shape.
Now for a RLC circuit as shown in figure, the reactance or impedance between
terminals “a” and “c” depends on the values of L and C if the applied signal
frequency is constant.
 Circuit Components
 +9 supply voltage

 555 IC

 47KΩ resistor

 2.2µF capacitor (2 pieces)

 Speaker (8Ω)

 170Turns of 10cm diameter coil (any gauge would work

Working
The figure shows the circuit diagram of metal detector. The 555 IC timer here
acts as a square wave generator and it generate pulses with frequencies audible
to human. The capacitor between pin2 and pin1 should not be changed as it is need
to generate audible frequencies.
In the circuit there is an RLC circuit formed by 47K resistor, 2.2µF capacitor, and
150turn inductor. This RLC circuit is the metal detection part. Now as mentioned
earlier in previous section, a metal core inductor has a high inductance value over a
air cored one.
Remember the coil wound here is a air cored one, so when a metal piece is brought
near the coil, the metal piece acts as a core for the air cored inductor. By this metal
acting as a core, the inductance of the coil changes or increases considerably. With
this sudden increase in inductance of coil the overall reactance or impedance of the
RLC circuit changes by a considerable amount when compared without the metal
piece.
At first when there is no metal piece the signal fed to speaker causes some audible
sound. Now with the reactance change around the RLC circuit the signal sent to
speaker will no longer be the same as before, because of this the sound produced by
the speaker will be of different to the first one.
So whenever a metal is brought near the coil, the impedance of RLC changes
making the signal to change resulting in variation to sound generated in speaker.