Electrical Sources

Lecture-3 (5th Oct. 2020, 8 am - 8:45 am)

EEE1001 – Basics of Electrical and Electronics

Engineering
Dr. B Rajanarayan Prusty
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering

School of Electrical Engineering (SELECT)

Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore
 Outline

• Electric Circuit
• Electrical Sources

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 Electric Circuit
• An electric circuit is a connection of circuit elements (active as well as
passive) into one or more closed loops.

• Node: It is a point in a circuit where two or more circuit elements

are connected.
– In the circuit there are 5 circuit elements e1, e2, e3, e4 and e5. These five
elements are connected to each other with the help of three nodes.
– Frequently committed mistake: Most of the time the reader is under the
impression that the points a, b, …, g, and h all are 8 nodes of the circuit.
But as ab, cd, ef, fg and gh are the wires not the elements hence a and b, c
and d and e, f, g and h will act as node-1, node-2 and node-3 respectively.
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 Continued…
• Degree of a node
– It indicates the number of circuit elements connected to a node.
– If it is more than 2 then the node is a “junction”. A node present in any
circuit can never have a degree of 1.
• Terminal
– It is that set of points in the circuit (otherwise known as terminal points)
where the devices from outside are accessible. With the help of terminal
points both application of excitation and measurement of response (with
the help of any measuring instrument) can be done.
• Loop
– It is any closed path of a circuit where no node is encountered more than
once. To find any loop in an electric circuit, start at a node in the circuit
and start traveling from this node along a path back to the same node but
ensure that not a single node is encountered more than once. Loop can
also be defined as a closed path of a circuit that may contain any other
closed path inside it.
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 Continued…
• Mesh
– It is that special loop that does not contain any other loop(s) inside it. All
meshes can be said to be loops, but the reverse is not valid.
• Branch
– It is a part of any electric circuit consisting of one or more circuit elements
(connected in series) between two junctions.
– A branch can never be a closed path. However, for a single loop circuit, the
closed path can be considered as a branch.
– The braches that are common to any two meshes in a circuit are called an
internal branch; otherwise, they are called as an outer branch.
– Simply a wire connected between two nodes without any elements can
never be considered as a branch.
– Note: When one of the elements of a branch is open-circuited, the current
in other elements of the branch will also be zero. Hence the remaining
portion of the branch can be removed as its presence in the circuit does
not affect the circuit variables.
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 Continued…
• Open Circuit and Short Circuit
– A circuit element is said to be open or open-circuited if the current
flowing through it is zero regardless of the voltage across it, i.e., I = 0 A for
all V.
– A circuit element is said to be short or short-circuited if the voltage across
it is zero regardless of the magnitude of the current flowing through it,
i.e., V = 0 V for all I.

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 Electrical Sources
• Electrical sources are the devices that are capable of converting
nonelectrical energy to electrical energy.
• Sources in electrical circuits are generally referred to as the
supplier of electrical energy to the rest of the circuit.
– Hence there must be at least one energy source present to supply
electrical energy to the circuit.
– There may be more than one source connected in an electric circuit.
• The two principal types of sources are voltage and current
sources.
– A voltage source is an electric device that is capable of generating a given
voltage at its terminal.
– A current source is an electronic circuit that delivers or absorbs an electric
current, which is independent of the voltage across it.

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 Continued…
• The sources in electric circuits can be classified in many ways.
• Electrical sources may broadly be classified as
– Ideal independent sources,
– Dependent sources, and
– Practical sources.
• Ideal Independent Sources:
– An ideal source provides a constant voltage or current regardless of the part of the
circuit connected to it, and it is said to be independent if the source level does not
depend on circuit quantities elsewhere in the circuit.
– An independent source can't take voltage and current other than its defined value.
– Ideal independent sources are the idealized models of the actual sources.
– The circuit symbol for an independent source is a circle with either a current
direction or voltage polarity mark indicated inside it and depicted under:

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 Continued…
– Ideal independent voltage source: An ideal independent voltage source
produces a constant voltage in spite of a variable load imposed on it.
Hence its voltage magnitude is entirely independent of the amount of
current exhausted from the source.
– Ideal independent current source: An independent current source
maintains a constant current, which is unaffected by any other quantity. It
is not possible to force an independent current source to take up a
current, which is different from its defined value. An ideal current source
has infinite internal resistance so that changes in load resistance will not
change the current supplied.
• Dependent Sources:
– The performance of electronic devices can be reasonably modeled with the help
of dependent sources.
– A source is said to be a dependent source if the output of the source depends on
voltage or current somewhere else in the circuit. It is also called a controlled
source.

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 Continued…
– The output of these sources is not determined by the external cause but
instead by current or voltage internal to the circuit.
– It is impossible to specify the value of dependent sources unless the
voltage or current on which it depends is known.
– The circuit symbol of a dependent source is a diamond with either a
current direction or voltage polarity mark indicated inside it.

– The dependent voltage sources are of two types: voltage dependent

voltage source and current dependent voltage source.
– The dependent current sources are of two types: voltage dependent
current source and current dependent current source.

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 Continued…
• Practical Sources:
– In real, all the sources have some internal resistances in contrast to the
ideal case. Practical sources are either a practical voltage source or a
practical current source.
– Due to the presence of the internal resistance, the voltage delivered by a
practical voltage source is no more constant as in the ideal case, but it
changes as the current changes and is dependent on the current it
delivers. The voltage will drop as the current delivered by it increases.
– A practical current source is represented as an ideal current source
connected with the resistance in parallel.

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 Source Conversion
• Most of the time, while solving for different circuit variables (node
voltages or branch currents), it becomes convenient to solve if we
adopt source conversion i.e., converting a voltage source into a current
source or vice versa.
• Any voltage source in series with a resistor across any two terminal
points can be converted into a current source in parallel with the same
resistor across the same terminal points and vice versa.

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 Thank you

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