Fundamentals of Electric Circuits 5th Edition

Book Preface

You may be wondering why we chose a photo of NASA’s Mars Rover for the cover. We actually chose it for several reasons. Obviously, it is very exciting; in fact, space represents the most exciting frontier for the entire world! In addition, much of the Rover itself consists of all kinds of circuits. Circuits that must work without needing maintenance! Once you are on Mars, it is hard to find a technician!

The Rover must have a power system that can supply all the power necessary to move it, help it collect samples and analyze them, broadcast the results back to Earth, and receive instructions from Earth. One of the important issues that make the problem of working with the rover is that it takes about 20 minutes for communications to go from the Earth to Mars. So the Rover does not make changes required by NASA quickly.

What we find most amazing is that such a sophisticated and complicated electro-mechanical device can operate so accurately and reliably after flying millions of miles and being bounced onto the ground! Here is a link to an absolutely incredible video of what the Rover is all about and how it got to Mars:

Features New to This Edition

A model for magnetic coupling is presented in Chapter 13 that will make analysis easier as well as enhance your ability to find errors. We have successfully used this model for years and felt it was now time to add it to the book. In addition, there are over 600 new end-of-chapter problems, changed end-of-chapter problems, and changed practice problems.

We have also added National Instruments MultisimTM solutions for almost all of the problems solved using PSpice®. There is a Multisim tutorial available on our website. We have added National Instruments Multisim since it is very user-friendly with many more options for analysis than PSpice. In addition, it allows the ability to modify circuits easily in order to see how changing circuit parameters impacts voltages, currents, and power. We have also moved the tutorials for PSpice, MATLAB ®, and KCIDE to our website to allow us to keep up with changes in the software.

We have also added 43 new problems to Chapter 16. We did this to enhance using the powerful s-domain analysis techniques to finding voltages and currents in circuits.

Retained from Previous Editions

A course in circuit analysis is perhaps the first exposure students have to electrical engineering. This is also a place where we can enhance some of the skills that they will later need as they learn how to design.

An important part of this book is our 121 design a problem problems. These problems were developed to enhance skills that are an important part of the design process. We know it is not possible to fully develop a student’s design skills in a fundamental course like circuits. To fully develop design skills a student needs a design experience normally reserved for their senior year. This does not mean that some of those skills cannot be developed and exercised in a circuits course. The text already included open-ended questions that help students use creativity, which is an important part of learning how to design. We already have some questions that are open-ended but we desired to add much more into our text in this important area and have developed an approach to do just that. When we develop problems for the student to solve our goal is that in solving the problem the student learns more about the theory and the problem solving process. Why not have the students design problems like we do? That is exactly what we do in each chapter. Within the normal problem set, we have a set of problems where we ask the student to design a problem to help other students better understand an important concept. This has two very important results. The first will be a better understanding of the basic theory and the second will be the enhancement of some of the student’s basic design skills. We are making effective use of the principle of learning by teaching. Essentially we all learn better when we teach a subject. Designing effective problems is a key part of the teaching process. Students should also be encouraged to develop problems, when appropriate, which have nice numbers and do not necessarily overemphasize complicated mathematical manipulations.

A very important advantage to our textbook, we have a total of 2,447 Examples, Practice Problems, Review Questions, and End-of- Chapter Problems! Answers are provided for all practice problems and the odd numbered end-of-chapter problems.