ENSC320 Preliminaries

How does this course fit with others?

! This course is linked to 380, Linear Systems, et

al., and there is some (very welcome) overlap.
You have an advantage if you have taken 380
already. If you haven’t taken 380 then you will
have an advantage in it when after taking 320.

! 320 covers electrical and electromagnetic circuits

where the time domain is continuous. The
backbone tool is the Laplace transform - an
example of complex plane integration, and a more
general form of the Fourier transform.

! Recall your prerequisites: (ENSC 220 or MSE 250),

MATH 232, and (MATH 260 or MATH 310)

! Particularly ENSC 220:

- electrical circuit quantities and elements;
- circuits laws:- Ohm’s, Kirchoff’s, series and parallel;
- op-amps, voltage and current sources;
- network theorems; nodal and mesh methods;
- natural and step responses for 1st and 2nd order circuits;
- real, reactive and rms power concepts.
- labcraft, lab safety.

! Other tools include the language of electrical

engineering - complex numbers.
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! Jargon:- e.g., resistors are “memoryless”, but
inductors and capacitors can be considered as
having memory.

! Impedance of an ideal resistor:

Impedance of a real-world resistor:

! Impedance of a capacitor and an inductor:

What on earth is j ?

Impedance of a real world capacitor and inductor:

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! Homework is in blue font. This is not to be
handed in for marking, but you are struggling with
it, discuss it with your TA or ask me.

! Preliminaries from N&R Chapter 1: Circuit Variables

! Read Section 1.1 Gives an overview of circuit theory

and a recipe for solving circuit problems

! Review Section 1.2 Tables 1.1 (SI units) and 1.2

(Derived units in SI) – and Table 1.3:-

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Basic Circuit Variables: voltage, current, energy, power.

! Voltage: energy per unit charge

2. Current: rate of change (flow) of charge

3. Power: rate of change (flow) of energy

4. Relationship between energy (w) and power (Watts)

(Note the dodgy symbol convention!)

Can P be negative - ie., can power be negative?

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! Positive power indicates energy is being
dissipated in the circuit element.
Negative indicates the circuit is supplying power.

cf:-

! The terminology/notation conventions are seldom

as consistent as we would like.

! It’s usually OK to make your own personal

convention as long as you lay out all the
definitions clearly.

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From N&R:-

What’s going on here?

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N&R: Assessment Problem 1.3
Find the total charge entering terminal 1. (4000µC)

Starting point:-

Does this look right?

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Example 1.3
Find the total energy delivered to the circuit element

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Assignment 0: Basic mathematical tools

As with the Preliminaries above, this is material that

you should know. But it is critical for this course that
you do not get held up because you are struggling
with the basic mathematical tools.

! Brush-up on and complex numbers:-

operating with polar and cartesian forms:

addition, subtraction, multiplication, division

! Complex roots of unity, general powers and roots

! Conjugations*, absolute value, triangle inequality,

Reference: any basic math text, Wikipedia, etc.

! Brush-up on the Dirac delta function

! Brush-up on the Fourier transform

! Convolution and Correlation

! Use of Matlab - if you do not know how to use it,

then learn it! It is quick and intuitive, and is
extremely useful for engineers because it
evaluates functions and plots them professionally
with a minimum effort. You will be using it in this
course (and every other one!)
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Homework:
The mathematics:
surely

Test the mathematics with x=3.9, a=7.8

The Matlab:

%This is my comment line

clear all; close all
x=3.9;
a=7.8;
z1=(x^a)^(1/a)
z2=(x^(1/a))^(a)
>> z1 = 3.9000
>> z2 = 3.9000

YOU test the mathematics with x=-1, a=3.

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! Try to sketch a circuit diagram of your
house/apartment mains wiring. There will be an
“input power” connection perhaps with 2 phases
(2 live wire connections), a neutral wire, and
perhaps a ground wire; circuit breakers, power
circuits with switched outlets attached to
applicances such as a heater, and lighting circuits
with switches attached to lights.

It should indicate how the wires are connected,

how the switches connect within the circuit, how
the appliances (and you) are protected from
current overload (ie., getting electrocuted!),
including live-to-earth currents, and may indicate
why, in some (badly wired) houses, when the
fridge or some other major appliance turns on, the
lights dim a bit.

! Write out and calculate the admittance of a 470

Ohm resistor in series with a 100mF capacitor.

! Write the impedance of a 15 Siemen conductance

in parallel with a 10µ
µH inductor

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! The following examples are from [J.Cavers,
Refresher on Complex Numbers and Variables,
2004]. Several of you may not need to do this
exercise, but I recommend it for everyone anyway.
You need to be very athletic and confident with
complex number manipulations, or else you will
get bogged down with complex arithmetic rather
than the techniques of this course.

! This stuff is Assignment 0. You do not hand

anything in, and it is not worth anything towards
your grade. Can you spot any errors?

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More Prerequisites: Can you do any of these? Let me
know if they look too mysterious to tackle.

! Draw this function

! Draw a graph of the step function, given by

! Draw a depiction of:

! How is the delta function defined?

! Write the equations for correlation and

convolution

! Write the equations of the Fourier transform

! Write the equations for the Laplace transform

! What is the difference between these transforms?

These are questions that you should all be able to

answer - but perhaps can’t! Knowing this stuff is
necessary for electric circuits. It will take a couple of
lectures and YOUR homework to get the cobwebs off.
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What’s coming:
1. Basic descriptions of signals. These are used for
voltages, currents and power in circuits, and other
physical quanties in sensing, communications,
energy.
* The continuous sinusoidal mains power reticulation
waveforms will be the vehicle.

2. For circuit design, we will need to delve deeper into

some basic mathematical descriptions of signals, i.e.,
some signal theory.
* The Fourier transform links a time domain signal,
in particular a repeating signal, and its spectrum of
real frequencies.
* This may be tough-going for many of you, so please
ensure that you get on top of it by asking questions as
we move through it.

3. From this basis, we will get to know the Laplace

transform techniques to go between time domain
transient signals and their complex frequency
domain description, and use these to design passive
and active (amplified) circuits.

4. We will use the signal description toolbox to

understand some other really powerful techniques
such as two-port systems and applications to
magnetic circuits.

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Understanding circuits and their design

! Much of the use of electronic circuits is for the sensing

and/or processing of physical signals

! Sensor examples: gyro, accelerometer, CCD camera,

chemical sensor (pH, radon, gas, etc.), and spatial
sensors - antenna, microphone, loudspeaker, etc.

! The sensor itself is one component of the electric

circuit - it converts a physical signal to an electrical
signal.

! The sensor’s voltage or current signal must be

processed in order to detect information, or to transmit
it to somewhere else, and so on.

! DSP does the heavyweight processing.

! But getting the sensor’s voltage signal digitized, while

it sounds simple (“just use an ADC”), it is a fraught set
of operations - so plenty can, and does, go wrong,
and we may not be aware of the problem.

! The digital signal processing and all algorithms, which

include trendy terms like Machine Learning, Deep
Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Support Vector
Machines, Expert Systems, and even AI, etc., et al.,
ad infinitum, ad nauseam, can only be as good as the
digitized samples that they receive.
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! The electronic circuit’s sampling integrity is nearly
always the biting constraint of system performance.

! The sampling theorem and other theoretical tools tell

us that it is possible for a set of samples to completely
represent any analogue signal.

! But this is a mathematical concept, and the limiting

form is never the case in practice.

! As engineers, we must cover the theory, the analogue

signal techniques and design, and the digital
processing stuff, algorithms, including the computer
coding.

! The good news is that the coding is the easy part!

! Back to the biting constraint on system performance -

the amount of distortion in the digital data - needs to
well understood for good system design.

! Some of the most important electrical circuits are

purely to reduce this distortion.

! For example, a critical component for converting a

physical signal to data, is an anti-aliasing filter where
the amount of inevitable digital signal distortion is well
understood. We will do a project on designing such a
filter.

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! As a final note, you would have heard a lot of talk in
recent years about Artificial Intelligence, Deep
Learning, Machine Learning, and so on.

! These are trendy terms for signal processing. Such

buzzwords usually indicate that we are trying to detect
something from signals (including data, such as text,
images, video, sounds, and mixtures of these).

! The traditional words for this are detection and

filtering, under the umbrella of statistical signal
processing.

! For example, if we want to use your mobile data to

detect whether you have been within 1 meter of a
covid-bearer, then we want a specific filter for that
specific information.

! So filters are called by all sorts of names, but the

basic concept of a filter does not change.

! A high quality filter design requires a high quality

foundation on signals! This course puts some of the
basics into place.

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