John Santiago

When doing circuit analysis, you need to know some essential laws, electrical quantities, relationships, and theorems.Ohm’s law is a key device equation that relates current, voltage, and resistance. Using Kirchhoff’s laws, you can simplify a network of resistors using a single equivalent resistor. You can also do the same type of calculation to obtain the equivalent capacitance and inductance for a network of capacitors or inductors.

Certain electrical quantities, relationships, and electrical units are critical to know when you’re analyzing and characterizing circuit behavior. The following table can help you keep this information straight.

The op amp circuit is a powerful took in modern circuit applications. You can put together basic op amp circuits to build mathematical models that predict complex, real-world behavior. Commercial op amps first entered the market as integrated circuits in the mid-1960s, and by the early 1970s, they dominated the active device market in analog circuits.

Laplace transform methods can be employed to study circuits in the s-domain. Laplace techniques convert circuits with voltage and current signals that change with time to the s-domain so you can analyze the circuit's action using only algebraic techniques. Connection constraints are those physical laws that cause element voltages and currents to behave in certain ways when the devices are interconnected to form a circuit.

A first-order RL parallel circuit has one resistor (or network of resistors) and a single inductor. First-order circuits can be analyzed using first-order differential equations. By analyzing a first-order circuit, you can understand its timing and delays.Analyzing such a parallel RL circuit, like the one shown here, follows the same process as analyzing an RC series circuit.

In circuits, inductors resist instantaneous changes in current and store magnetic energy. Inductors are electromagnetic devices that find heavy use in radiofrequency (RF) circuits. They serve as RF “chokes,” blocking high-frequency signals. This application of inductor circuits is called filtering. Electronic filters select or block whichever frequencies the user chooses.

When timing is off in your computer, specific events don’t occur in the right order. But if you know the physics and i-v relationships of resistors and capacitors, you can create a circuit that detects pulses; then when a pulse is missing, the circuit can trigger an alarm notifying the user of a timing problem.

Here’s your chance to convert light into electricity using simple operational circuits. You can apply a similar approach to develop instruments that measure other physical variables in the environment, such as temperature and pressure. You use an input transducer to turn a physical variable into an electrical variable.

Circuit analysis is a tricky subject, and it’s easy to make certain mistakes, especially when you’re first starting out. You can reduce your odds of making these common mistakes by reviewing the following list. Failing to label voltage polarities and current directions When you analyze any circuit, the first step is to properly label the voltage polarities and current direction for each device in the circuit.