Partial preview of the text
Download NODE AND MeSH ANALYSIS and more Study notes Circuit Theory in PDF only on Docsity!
Chapter 3 Solving for Voltage and Current Nodal Analysis If you know Ohm’s Law, you can solve for all the voltages and currents in simple resistor circuits, like the one shown below. In this chapter, we'll cover the basic strategy of solving circuits, which is called nodal analysis. It consists of writing KCL (the sum of the current flowing into a node is zero) for each node in the circuit, using the node voltages and the device current equations to find the currents through each device. This chapter we will use resistors, current sources and voltage sources in our examples which were given in Chapter 2. By solving this system of equations, we can find the voltage at each node and the current between each pair of nodes. This basic method works for all circuits. It works by converting the circuit into a linear algebra problem (if there are not diodes involved. With diodes the problem is no longer a linear problem) which can be solved by many programs (for example Matlab). An example of a circuit you will be able to solve using this method is shown in Figure 3.1. Figure 3.1: Example of a circuit we can solve using nodal analysis We could stop there, but this method doesn’t provide much insight about the effect each device has on the behavior of the circuit, which is important in 47 
