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Wire carrying current to be measured.
Spring providing restoring force

Ammeter from the old Penn Station Terminal Service Plant at 250 West Thirty-first Street

An ammeter is a measuring instrument used to measure the flow of electric current in a circuit. Electric currents are measured in amperes, hence the name. The word "ammeter" is commonly misspelled or mispronounced as "ampmeter" by some.

The earliest design is the D'Arsonval galvanometer or moving coil ammeter. It uses magnetic deflection, where current passing through a coil causes the coil to move in a magnetic field. The voltage drop across the coil is kept to a minimum to minimize resistance across the ammeter in any circuit into which the it is inserted.

Moving iron ammeters use a piece or pieces of iron which move when acted upon by the electromagnetic force of a fixed coil of (usually heavy gauge) wire. This type of meter responds to both direct and alternating currents (as opposed to the moving coil ammeter, which works on direct current only).

To measure larger currents, a resistor called a shunt is placed in parallel with the meter. Most of the current flows through the shunt, and only a small fraction flows through the meter. This allows the meter to measure large currents. Traditionally, the meter used with a shunt has a full-scale deflection (FSD) of 50mV, so shunts are typically designed to produce a voltage drop of 50mV when carrying their full rated current.

More modern ammeter designs are non-mechanical, or digital, and use an analog to digital converter (ADC) to measure the voltage across the shunt resistor. The ADC is read by a microcomputer that performs the calculations to display the current through the resistor.

One problem with the use of an ammeter is the need for the meter to be inserted into the circuit and become part of it. Mistakenly placing the ammeter in parallel with a circuit will blow the fuse, possibly damaging the meter and causing injury. In AC circuits, a current transformer converts the magnetic field around a conductor into a small AC current, typically either 1 or 5 Amps at full rated current, that can be easily read by a meter. In a similar way, accurate AC/DC non-contact ammeters have been constructed using Hall effect magnetic field sensors.

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