Español
Türkçe
Français
عربي 
dansk
한국어
Deutsch
Việt Nam
Italiano
日本語
Português
All transformers work the same way. take AC power in, convert it to magnetic flux with a coil (the primary), transfer that flux to another coil (the secondary) through the core, and then get AC power out of the secondary. Ideally, you want 100% efficiency all the power in the primary turns into magnetic flux and *all* of that gets turned back into power in the secondary. You don't want any turning into heat in the core and you don't want any magnetic flux escaping and creating power somewhere other than the secondary. And you want it to be easy to build, cheap, reliable, and (sometimes) compact/light
As usual with engineering, these things are all in conflict with each other. To minimize heating in the core you need to minimize eddy currents (stray electrical loop currents in the core), which means making the core from lots of thin plates, which is more complicated/expensive than one big block. You want the core to be a circular cross-section, but that requires each plate to be a different shape. You want it to be compact and light, which generally means a tight circular shape, but you want all the coil windings to be evenly spaced, which means the windings need to be on straight chunks of the core. And you'd like to be able to build these with machines so they don't take forever to build and cost a fortune in specialty equipment.
All the different cores are trying to balance all these conflicting requirements. Some are cheaper/easier, some are higher performance, and each is trying to balance requirements to find some "optimum".
Core-type configurations are used for high voltage/high power needs. Although their power losses tend to be higher, the windings in core type are readily available so maintenance is easier than in shell type transformers. Finally, because in core-type transformers the windings are placed on separate legs, more copper is required in the manufacturing of core-type transformers.
Toroidal is high-performance and very compact but is very difficult to wind and has unevenly spaced windings.
C-core is higher performance than EI- or UI-core but still (relatively) easy to build.
R-core is a C-core with more complicated laminates that give a rounder cross section...built like Ca-core but with more expensive precursor material.
And so on.
Related Products:
