Day Five - Nodal Analysis Lab and Mesh Analysis Lecture 3/16/2017

Today, we talked about Nodal Analysis in our experiment.

Here is the schematic of the circuit.
Pre-Lab:
The measured resistances are 21.6k for 22k, 6.4k for 6.8k, and 10k for 10k ohms resistors.
Using Nodal Analysis, we calculated that the V2 = 4.424 and the V1 = 2.424.

This is the setup of this experiment.
Measured values for the voltage V1 and V2 are 4.34 and 2.37.

These images show the measured voltage across the 20k and 6.8k resistors.

Percent error:
For V1, the percent error is -2.2%
For V2, the percent error is -1.9%

After this lab, we did some mesh analysis questions.

Here is the circuit, and we separate this circuit into three meshes.
For mesh, the total V is equal to zero, so using KVL is an easy approach to this problem.

Another problem that require mesh analysis.
For two meshes circuit, we can see that using mesh analysis might be a little bit overkill because it requires more equation than using nodal analysis.

Summary:
Nodal Analysis is practical on real circuit situation as we can see that from our lab. The percent error is very low that it is acceptable. For a circuit that has many meshes, we should use mesh analysis.
Like the example we did in class, mesh analysis is useful on the circuit that has no current source and has many meshes; otherwise, other methods such as nodal analysis should be considered.