Lab 2- Linear Circuits II

Patrick Sicurello
June 15, 2018

Date Performed: June 8-13, 2018

Instructor: Professor Matthias Reinsch

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Signatures

Problem 2.1
In the Fourier synthesizer we used the presets to generate a square, triangle,
and pulse waveforms. Typing in the coefficients calculated in our pre-lab gives a
rough ramp function that it should, except the sine waves are still fairly obvious.
The output isn’t perfect since we are working with only 19 coefficients in the
synthesizer rather than the infinite that we’d need for a perfect ramp function.

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Problem 2.2
We rebuilt the high-pass filter from Lab 1, using a 0.01 µF capacitor and a
10 kΩ resistor. We qualitatively analyze frequency values between 100 Hz to
20kHz.
The high-pass filter only lets through the high frequency portions of the square
wave, which is shown in the lower frequencies. As we increase the frequency of
the signal generator, more of the square wave gets through.

Problem 2.3
Turning off the lower frequencies changes the square wave in the Fourier Syn-
thesizer, showing more of the individual sine waves than the oscilloscope for
our high-pass filter. This is because some of the lower frequency portions of the
wave in our high-pass filter is getting phase shifted by the circuit pieces, causing
it to cancel certain parts of the signal(i.e. a trough getting canceled by a peak).
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Specifically, we know the phase shift to be φ = arctan( 2π/RC ).

Problem 2.4
We swapped the resistor and capacitor of the high-pass filter to make a low-pass
filter. We know when Vin = +1V , Vout = +1V , so there is no current flowing.
When Vin = −1V , then Vout = +1V , so there is current flowing into the ca-
pacitor causing the signal to drop. Now the square wave only comes through
at lower frequencies for a similar reason in problem 2.2; the low-pass filter lets
more of the wave get through at lower frequencies.

We pass a square wave into our circuit to demonstrate it’s low-pass filter be-
havior at higher frequencies. It is easy to see that not much of the square wave
gets through at these frequencies.

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Figure 1: High-Pass filter at 100 Hz

Figure 2: High-pass filter at 2.5 kHz

Figure 3: High-pass
4 filter at 20 kHz
 Figure 4: Low-pass square wave at 589 Hz

Problem 2.5
We built an inductor by winding 22-gauge wire around a toroid 25 times. We
measured its inductance to be 1.513 mH. We built an RL series circuit and
measured its amplitude and phase shift.

Frequency (Hz) Vout (mV) Phase Shift (degrees)

100 2 2
500 14.8 87
1,000 54.2 83.44
2,000 107 81.2
5,000 260 67.53
10,000 476 49.37
10,684 500 48.51
20,000 728 38.01
50,000 920 15.24
100,000 980 5.17
500,000 1,000 0
1,000,000 1,000 -7
We found the roll-off frequency to be around 10,684 Hz. It’s graph can be seen
above.

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Figure 5: RL High-pass filter

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Figure 6: Trace for filter response to square waves

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 Figure 7: Resonance of RLC Circuit at around 14 kHz

Problem 2.6
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We wanted a circuit that resonates around 10kHz. To do so, we solve ωo = √LC
2
for C, which gives C = L ωo2 to get 0.1 µF. We use our 1.5.13 mH inductor and
a 10kΩ load resistor. We drove a 20 Vpp signal through our RLC circuit and
isolated the voltage source with a 1 MΩ resistor. Our graph can be seen above.

For this circuit with a 10 kΩ load resistor, we found the resonance width to be
δω = 130 Hz and the resulting Q to be 53.46. We also calculated Q for multiple
other load resistances and graphed them:

Resistance (Ω) Q-Factor

330 1.615
1000 7.897
3300 26.79
10000 53.46
33000 86.81
100000 99.00
We see in Figures 5 and 6 that our measured Q values are absolutely nothing
like the theoretical values predicted by the equation Q = √2RC
LC
. Most likely, the
approximations that led to this equation caused the huge discrepancy between
the predicted and actual values. It is also possible that the formula Q = ωδωw
fails us for our relatively low values of Q.

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 Figure 8: Q-factor for various resistances

Figure 9: Predicted Q-factor curve vs. measured Q

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Problem 2.7
We wound a separate wire 5 times around our inductor We drove our circuit
with a 5 Vpp , 100kHz signal and isolated the generator with a 20Ω resistor. We
let the 5 turns be the primary and 25 be the secondary. The primary gave us
2.24 V and secondary gave 11.4 V. The stepup ratio = VVoi = 5.089. The theo-
retical value is the ratio of the number of turns, which gives 5; so our measured
value is close to our predicted value.

For the stepdown ratio we switched the primary and secondary coils. We found
the primary to be 19.8 V and the secondary to be 4.20 V. This gave us a step-
down ratio of 0.2121, which is partially off from 0.20 (or 15 ).

We added a 3Ω load resistor to the secondary side to remeasure the stepdown

ratio. We found the primary to be 10.6 V and the secondary to be 2.16 V,
which gives us a stepdown ratio of 0.20. This gives us exactly the predicted
value, even though our resistor was ±10% off of the nominal value (it was 3.35
Ω).

Attaching the generator to channel 1, we measured the difference in amplitudes

of the inductor and the signal generator. We found the difference from the
primary and signal to be 3.20 V, giving a current of I25 = 0.872V
3.359Ω = 0.156A
through the 25-loop wiring. We measure the difference between the secondary
and signal to be 0.872V, so I5 = 0.872V
3.359Ω = 0.257A through the 5-loop wiring.
This gives us the current ratio of 1.65. This is small compared to our predicted
value of 5 for the ratio.

Problem 2.8
Playing the tank circuit simulation in Multisim, we noticed that R is directly
proportional to Q in this case, as the width of the pulse gets wider as we increase
the resistance of the load resistor. It was easier to notice this by increasing the
sample size to 1,000. The phase shift also made sense, since playing with the
capacitance increased or decreased the phase shift accordingly. It also lined up
exactly with the peak of the amplitude.

Problem 2.9
We played around with a RC circuit in Multisim and looking at the transient
behavior of the circuit. The response is still exponential, but what is interesting
is that the behavior returns to normal even after changing the capacitance by
a small value. If the capacitance is changed to be too large, the capacitor never

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 Figure 10: Diagram from http://instrumentationlab.berkeley.edu/Lab2

charges and the circuit never leaves the transient phase.

Problem 2.10
We built a mock-scope probe with a 2MΩ resistor from the diagram above. We
put a 24V DC voltage across the probe and got Vin = 26.351V and Vout =
21.85V.

We get a differences since the DMM effectively acts as a voltage divider, having
it’s own resistance of 10 M Ω. When our circuits start having larger resistances
(such as 2 M Ω), we can no longer ignore the impedance of the DMM.

After attaching the probe to the scope, we remeasured the voltages to be Vin =
26.351V and Vout = 8.075V. The output voltage is close to what we measured
on the scope itself, which was 8.12V. Attaching the scope decreases the effective
resistance of our scope probe, since the scope is in parallel with the probe, so
the voltage divider effect of the DMM no longer applies. This is because there
is no current flow.

Problem 2.11
We attach the mock probe from above to the signal generator and looked at
the frequencies from 10 Hz to 1MHz, then measured the amplitude at these
frequencies.

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 Frequency (Hz) Vpp
10 6.52
20 6.52
50 6.48
100 6.48
200 6.48
500 6.08
1000 5.12
2000 3.61
5000 1.68
2000 3.61
5000 1.68
10000 0.872
20000 0.424
50000 0.15
100000 0.0304
500000 0.0284
1000000 0.0276

Our circuit behaves like a low-pass filter because the resistor is connected in
series with the scope. Looking at the impedance of the scope, we get a term
that has imaginary terms, so it will behave slightly like capacitor. Using the
voltage divider equation, we found the impedance of the scope and add it to the
impedance of the resistor to give us the transfer function. Taking the magni-
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tude of this gives (R+r)2R+ω2 c02 r2 . We set this equal to 1/2 since this is when the
rolloff frequency occurs, and this gives us a rolloff frequency of 138kHz, which
is an order of magnitude 102 off from our measured. The point when our graph
reaches V√ max
2
= 4.61V is around 1280 Hz. Thus, our measured rolloff point is

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greater than the predicted rolloff.

Problem 2.12
We built a compensated mock probe by adding a capacitor in parallel with the
2MΩ resistor. At first we tried a 20 pF capacitor and got the following results:

Frequency (Hz) Amplitude

10 6.52
20 6.52
50 6.52
100 6.52
200 6.44
500 6.04
1000 5.16
2000 3.72
5000 2.44
10000 2.14
50000 2.04
100000 2.06
500000 2.1
1000000 2.1

We see that the amplitude varies as a function of the frequency. We tried to find
a capacitor that keeps the amplitude constant independent of the frequency. On
top of the 20 pF capacitor, we tried an 82 pF, 85 pF, and 100 pF capacitor with
the same frequencies as the chart above. Graphing them together, we can see
that the 82 pF capacitor works the best in holding the signal constant.
We also passed in square waves at high frequencies to show that the compen-
sated mock probe does a better job at preserving the shape of the square wave
than the uncompensated mock probe.

The last two pictures below show that the mock probe no longer behaves as
a low-pass filter, since much of the square wave is allowed to come through at
higher frequencies.

In order to calculate the theoretical capacitance, we need to solve for the complex
impedance of our circuit. We put a black box around the parallel RC circuit and
the parallel scope/wire combination. This gives us a voltage divider with the
equation VVoi = [ jωc0rr+1 ][ jωc0RR+1 + jωcr+1
r
]−1 , where c’ is the effective capacitance
of the scope, c is the capacitance of the scope probe, r is the resistance of the
scope probe, and R is the resistance of the scope. Deriving this in respect to ω
0
and setting it equal to zero gives the equation c = cRr , which gives us a value

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 Figure 11: Amplitude vs. Frequency for various capacitors

of c = 93.75 pF. This is not within 10% of the measured value 82, but is fairly
close (it’s within the same order of magnitude!)

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 Figure 12: 20 pF capacitor at 500 Hz

Figure 13: 82 pF capacitor at 10kHz

Figure 14: 100 pF capacitor

15 at 199.2 kHz