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Basic Laws 2

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Basic Laws 2

There are too many people praying for mountains of difficulty to be removed, when what they really need is the courage to climb them! —Unknown

Enhancing Your Skills and Your Career

ABET EC 2000 criteria (3.b), “an ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data.”

Engineers must be able to design and conduct e xperiments, as well as analyze and interpret data. Most students ha ve spent man y hours per forming experiments in high school and in college. During this time, you have been asked to analyze the data and to interpret the data. Therefore, you should already be skilled in these tw o activities. My recommendation is that, in the process of performing e xperiments in the future, you spend more time in analyzing and interpreting the data in the conte xt of the experiment. What does this mean?

If you are looking at a plot of voltage versus resistance or current versus resistance or power versus resistance, what do you actually see? Does the curve make sense? Does it agree with what the theory tells you? Does it differ from e xpectation, and, if so, wh y? Clearly, practice with analyzing and interpreting data will enhance this skill.

Since most, if not all, the e xperiments you are required to do as a student involve little or no practice in designing the experiment, how can you develop and enhance this skill?

Actually, developing this skill under this constraint is not as difficult as it seems. What you need to do is to take the experiment and analyze it. Just break it down into its simplest parts, reconstruct it trying to under stand why each element is there, and finally, determine what the author of the experiment is trying to teach you. Even though it may not always seem so, every experiment you do w as designed by someone who w as sincerely motivated to teach you something.

Learning Objectives

By using the information and exercises in this chapter you will be able to:

    1. Know and understand the voltage current relationship of resistors (Ohm’s law).
    1. Understand the basic structure of electrical circuits, essentially nodes, loops, and branches.
    1. Understand Kirchhoff’s voltage and current laws and their importance in analyzing electrical circuits.
    1. Understand series resistances and voltage division, and parallel resistances and current division.
    1. Know how to convert delta-connected circuits to wye-connected circuits and how to convert wye-connected circuits to deltaconnected circuits.