STRATHMORE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF COMPUTER AND ENGINEERING SCIENCES

BACHELOR IN ELECTRICAL AND ELECCTRONICS
ENGINEERING 138275 BAHATI BAKULIKIRA MELCHIOR

Lab Report 2: First Order DC transients

1. INTORDUCTION AND ABSTRACTS

The behaviour of the current and the voltage in the circuit switch is closed until it reaches its
final value is called dc transient response of the concerned circuit. The response of a circuit
(containing resistances, inductances, capacitors, and switches) due to sudden application of
voltage or current is called transient response. The most common instance of a transient
response in a circuit occurs when a switch is turned on or off –a rather common event in an
electric circuit.
In our experiment we are more interested in R-C dc transient circuit which are circuits with a
resistance and a capacitor.
In our experiment we are carrying two different and principal transient process that can occur
for an R-C circuit. The step response and the natural response, the natural response can also
be seen as the discharging process which will be more seen in the first experiment by
showing how resistors in the circuit are consuming the power from the energy storage
element (here the capacitor) while the second will treat the step response where a voltage
source is placed in a circuit with a capacitor to charge it.

2. OBJECTIVE
Our experiment has as main objective of our experiment is to observe explain
and the transient response of an RC Circuit process experimentally and plot and
display its graph
 3. METHODOLOGY AND APPARATUS
 Apparatus
Since the apparatus show in the set-up example of the experiment were not available in the
lab, we chose to use the closest to them which were present in the lab as instructed on the set
up shit.
We used:
 A 12V voltage source
 A 2mF capacitor (For the first experiment)
 A 25 µF Capacitor (For the second experiment)
 48 Ohms, 34 Ohms and 100ohms resistors (For the first experiment)
 30 K ohms, 45 K ohms and 100 K ohms Resistors (For the second experiment)
 A breadboard
 Jumper wires
 A special jumper wire as a switch, multi-meters
 Methodology
For both two experiments our methodology was based on three major steps which are
1. Setting up the circuit as shown in the set-up example with our values and observe the
response, got the time constant and plot the v(t) thanks to that information.
For this step our setup looks like this:

For the second system: (* Resistors are in k OHMS, so 30 = 30 Kohms)

 2. The second step was the calculations we make calculations according to theories and
exercises with done in class and we obtain the equation and plot it with either the
knowledges of plotting functions we have gotten from math or some functions
plotting software
3. The last step was to put our experiment set up in PSPICE and plot it as a way of
verifying our equations gotten from the two first steps.
The results and plots from those three different steps will be seen and interpreted in the
results and finding’s part later in this report.

4. Literature Reviews
Ideal and real capacitors: An ideal capacitor has an infinite dielectric resistance and plates
(made of metals) that have zero resistance. However, an ideal capacitor does not exist as all
dielectrics have some leakage current and all capacitor plates have some resistance. A
capacitor’s of how much charge (current) it will allow to leak through the dielectric medium.
Ideally, a charged capacitor is not supposed to allow leaking any current through the
dielectric medium and assumed not to dissipate any power loss in capacitor plates resistance.
Under this situation, the model as shown in fig. 10.16(a) represents the ideal capacitor.
However, all real or practical capacitor leaks current to some extend due to leakage resistance
of dielectric medium. This leakage resistance can be visualized as a resistance connected in
parallel with the capacitor and power loss in capacitor plates can be realized with a resistance
connected in series with capacitor. The model of a real capacitor is shown.
A source-free RC circuit occurs when its dc source is suddenly disconnected. The energy
already stored in the capacitor is released to the resistors. The natural response of a circuit
refers to the behaviour (in terms of voltages and currents) of the circuit itself, with no
external sources of excitation.
When the dc source of an RC circuit is suddenly applied, the voltage or current source can be
modelled as a step function, and the response is known as a step response.
The step response of a circuit is its behaviour when excitation is the step function, which may
be a voltage or a current source.
We spoke about the time constant, what is it? The time constant of a circuit is the time
required for the response to decay to a factor of 1_e or 36.8 percent of its initial value.
For an RC Circuit the time constant can be estimated by:
τ = RC
Where τ is the time constant, R is the equivalent resistor of the system when the switched is
opened (closed in specific cases) and C the capacitor.
An assumption that a capacitor is completely charged(discharged) when the charging
(discharging) time has reached 5-time constants. This assumption will be very useful for our
experiment.
 5. RESULTS AND FINDINGS
5.1. For the first setup
After setting the circuit as shown in the methodology set up, we first measure the initial
voltage across our capacitor just before opening the switch with our voltmeter and we found
that it is
4.14 V. And then we opened our switch to begin discharging our capacitor and we launch our
chronometer to know when the capacitor will be completely discharged. We will know that’s
the capacitor is completely discharged when at our 100 resistor we will begin receiving a
current signal because our capacitor will behave like a wire (A short circuit). After setting our
chronometer we found a current signal at our 100 resistor the chronometer was showing 0.25
s A very short amount of time which we noticed after several experiment, but which
confirmed that our experiment is a transient (Short amount of time) experiment.
From the assumption that our discharging time is equal to 5 time constant we said that our
time constant is therefore τ = 0.25/5 = 0.05s
And since we have the initial value of the voltage across our capacitor and our time constant,
we could find the equation with the formula we know V(t) = Vo * e^(-t/τ)
Which gives us the equation V(t) = 4.14 * e^(-20t)
Which we plot and got:

The second step was to use the calculations and found the v(t) Equation.
Let’s go our calculations.
We know that V(t) = Vo * e^(-t/τ)
And we know that Vo is the voltage when the switch is about to be opened, in short, the total
voltage in our capacitor then to find it we know that before the switch is opened our capacitor
is acting as an open circuit and at steady state. And therefore, our circuit will be composed of
2 resistors 34 ohms and 100ohms in parallel and the 48 ohms resistor in series with those 2.
The current of our circuit will therefore be:
I = 12/ (48 + (100//34)) = 163.5475997 mA and from that we can easily use the voltage
division rule to find our Vo which is:
Vo = (100//34) * I = 4.149715216 V.
And we also know that our τ = RC, where R is the equivalent resistor when the switch is already
open, therefore R = (100// 34) and c = 2mF as given in the circuit.
Therefore, we have τ = 17/335s and our equation from calculations is V(t) = 4.145e^(-335t/17)
- From PSPICE after putting the schematic as show in fig.1 we found:

5.0V

2.5V

0V
0s 0.5s 1.0s 1.5s 2.0s 2.5s 3.0s
V(U2:2)
Time
2. For the second set up we have
For this set up we use the same way of thinking as describe for the first one and we got our Vo
= 6.9 mV and our chronometer showed us 4 s therefore our time constant is 0.8s and we can
easily determine that our Vc (t) = 6.9 e^(-10t/8) mV and while doing the experiment we put
on of our multimeters at the 45 k ohms and through out all the process we found that it was
the same as the voltage read at the capacitor so we concluded that Vo(t) = V(t) and it’s equal
to Vo(t) = 6.9 e^(-10t/8).
Plotting those two voltages gives us: v(t) On the left and Vo(t) on the right

Then as for the previous exercise we calculated the Vo(t) and the V(t) with the same logic as
previously and we got v(t) = 47/7 e^ (-58/45) mV and Vo(t) = 47/7 e^ (-58/45) mV. This
equality can be explained by the fact that our Vc(t) is in a closed loop with our 100kohms
resistor and therefore they have the same voltage but opposite signs and then our 100kohms
resistor is in a closed loop again with the 45kohms resistor where we have to find the voltage
so they will have the same voltage but of opposite signs and therefore Vo(t) = -(-Vc(t)) and
Vo(t) = Vc(t) = 47/7 e^(-58/45).
After those two major steps we put our schematic in PSPICE, and we got this graph:
 8.0

4.0

0
0s
V

8. CONCLUSIONS AND REFERENCES

8.1. CONCLUSIONS
If we compare accurately those values, we have gotten we can easily see that they seem to be
almost the some apart from some lab errors which is the reason that lab values are not as
accurate as calculations values. And the graphs we are finding using PSPICE is easily
showing us that our lab experiment confirm the dc transient process. take note that while
plotting this in PSPICE we have taken care of the fact that we will use an interval to plot our
transient response. We also recommend that the lab can have as much different apparatus as
possible because this experiment was rescheduled twice for lack of apparatus to use.

8.2. REFERENCES
- Lectures notes
- Fundamentals of electric circuits
- https://www.desmos.com/calculator
- We also use PSpice (locally in our laptops) for circuit designing and plotting

Signature