EXPERIMENT LAB 1

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Introduction

Electricity is an essential part of the modern life experience, and as an engineer it is essential to
know how it behaves and responds to changes in its trajectory. This lab was divided into 2 major
parts namely part 1 were you will verify Ohm’s law by developing a variation of voltage against
current characteristic of a Resistor. Part 2 determine the current and voltage through current
dividers and voltage dividers. The main goal of this lab is to be able to verify Ohm’s law and to
analyse simple resistive circuits, to measure circuit properties like (Voltage, Current, Power) of
various elements in a circuit connected in series and parallel in addition the knowledge to construct
current dividers and voltage dividers will be gained and ways to determine unknown resistance will
be gained as well.

Objective

Apparatus

 Digital Multi-meter
 Resistor 1.5kΩ
 Resistor 2.2kΩ
 Resistor 10kΩ
 Resistor 4.7kΩ
 Bread Board – 1
 DC Power supply

Experiment Procedure

Series Circuit
1. Construct a circuit as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Series Circuit

LAB EXPERIMENT 1: Series Circuit

2. Using digital multi-meter measure the parameter in table 1.

Calculation Series Circuit
1. Calculate RT, I, and the voltage drop across each resistor. Record the values in Table

2. Use KVL to calculate VC, VBD, and VDA. Record the values in Table 1.

Table 1. Calculated and Measured Values for Circuit of Figure 1

Parameter Calculated Measured %Difference

RT 26.3
I 0.57
VAB 0.55
VBC 12.16
VCD 1.77
VBD 14.09
VDA -14.55
Voltage Divider Circuit

1. Construct a circuit as shown in Figure 2.

2. Using the multi-meter record the measure values in Table 2.

Figure 2: Voltage Divider

PMB 16102 Electrical and Electronics Fundamentals

LAB EXPERIMENT 1: Series Circuit

Calculation

Voltage Divider Circuit

1. Use the voltage divider principle to calculate VA and VB for the circuit shown in Figure

2 and record in Table 2.

Table 2. Calculated and Measured Values for Circuit of Figure 2

 Parameter Calculated Measured %Difference
VA 0.34 0.92
VB 8.36 8.08
VC 1.2

Analysis

Discussion

The simple explanation why there is a difference between the calculated values and the measured
values is because of the tolerance on the components. Resistors may be + - 1%, 5% or as high as
10%.

Conclusion

From the experiments carried out we have verified Ohm’s Law that V=IR. Also the nominal value of
carbon film resistors can be determined reasonably using the colour coded method although the
results don’t show exact correlation between measured and calculated. We saw that digital
multimeters gave us a higher level of accuracy when measuring current and resistance compared to
analog multimeters. We also learned that a bread board can be used for setting up temporary
circuits, and how the circuitry inside a bread board is aligned.