Active Low-Pass Filter Problem in Pspice

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excetara2

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Designed a Sallen Key low pass filter using Analog Devices wizard. The output in Pspice the cutoff is way down from where it should be. Instead of the cut-off of 2.5Khz. We get a cut-off of around 900Hz. Just wondering if any ideas why Pspice is causing this problem. We have a gain of 100 so 10 on each op-amp. Even with unity gain the same problems occur. Design and output attached.
 
Something is definitely wrong. Your passband gain should be a little over 40dB. Your Bode plot shows about 22dB.
 
I encountered the same issue simulating your circuit in Multisim.
The issue was somewhat resolved by replacing C2 with a 90nF Cap and C3 with an 80nF Cap.
I realise these values don't exist, but you could work around this possibly???

Edit: Ignore what I said, it's completely cactus.
 
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Figured out the problem. Driving the op-amps to hard. When dropped to unity gain, the devices worked properly. Just put a non-inverting op-amp at the last stage as the amplifier.

Another question. I am using the filter after a Beat Frequency Oscillator circuit. I don't have the circuit on this computer or I would post it. The oscillator seems to be askew. I wasn't exactly sure the best way to design this anyway. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. I was going to try it at 100KHz. THen have the two coils go into a mixer and then filtered. It was going to be a metal detector for finding nails on studs. More interested in the circuit design part. Thanks for the help so far.
 
Post what you have, or what you are thinking, and we'll check it out.
 
excetara2 said:
Here is the circuit. Any help would be awesome.
You need a nonlinear mixer. Summing the two oscillators through resistors R5 and R7 makes a linear mixer, like you would use for audio. There are various kinds of nonlinear mixers. I played around with your circuit (the oscillators) and an LM1496 as a mixer. It worked well, except... let me get to that in a minute.
You said you wanted 100kHz. I think the base caps should be 10nF instead of 100nF. This will yield 100kHz.
Back to the mixer... The problem I had was that if I left one of the inductors at 500uH, and changed the other one so that it was less than 4uH different from that value, the two oscillators would injection lock, i.e., they would pull each other to the same frequency, with zero difference. This is a known "feature" of oscillators, and I have had it happen in hardware. In fact, I was surprised to see it in a sim, because I had assumed that the culprits were power supply impedance, ground plane impedance, capacitive coupling, and electromagnetic coupling. None of these exist in a simulation, unless you add parts to make them happen. Apparently all the coupling was through the mixer. An active mixer like the LM1496 should have less crosstalk than, say, a diode mixer. My point is, you are going to have to be very careful in layout, parts placement, power supply decoupling, and choice of mixer, in order to get true zero beats. You might want to build in a frequency offset of a few hundred Hertz to minimize this problem.
 
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