Day 16 - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - Passive RC Circuits Natural Response and Passive RL Circuits

Today we developed some of the equations that we're going to use in lab. In RC circuits, we did a Kirchoff Current Law and ended up with the equation at the top of the picture below. Then we did some math and integration  to solve for V as time changes.

Then we defined our time constant for RC circuits as the greek letter tau.

Our first lab of today was called Passive RC Circuits.

After the lab we looked at RL Circuits. After we did a Kirchoff Voltage Law, we ended up with the equation at the top of the picture which is a differential equation with I as our independent variable. So, we solved for the current.

Then we noticed that the current and voltage are very closely related to each other.

Our second lab of today was called Passive RL Circuits. But, we were running out of time so, Mason did for us and gave a demonstration.

Mason showed us what the signal looked like.