Day 17 (Day19 on notes)

Today we learned about second order systems in parallel and did a RLC Circuit Response Lab.

Above is an example of a RLC circuit in circuit as review for what we did in day 16.

Above is an example of a RLC circuit in parallel. It should be noted that the equation for alpha changed and the rest is the same -> alpha=1/(2RC).

RLC Circuit Response Lab:
the purpose of this lab is to model and test a RLC circuit in parallel. On our pre-lab, we calculated values for omega and alpha and found that our circuit will be underdamped. We will be comparing these theoretical values with measured values. A 2V 500Hz square wave will be the voltage input.

Above is a picture of our circuit.


Above we have the output voltage were we can see that our circuit is very close to a criticllydamped curve which, based on our alpha and omega values, seems unreasonable.

We attempted to do a manually curve fit (not great) to find alpha, then used the period of the graph to find omega. As we can see we have a huge percent error which indicates something in our circuit is not working properly. We made sure to include actual measured resistances in the circuit for our theoretical circuit but did not change much. After much tinkering, we believe some faulty component was causing our circuit to behave differently than we predicted.