edmundsj / learnElectricalEngineering

Website for teaching electrical engineering
Other
4 stars 0 forks source link

Lesson 1.4 #8

Open edmundsj opened 3 years ago

edmundsj commented 3 years ago

Again, the image at the beginning is confusing, I don't understand its purpose.

The definition of inductance is incorrect - it's just phiB / I. If you want to write it in terms of phiB_0 (the flux through a single loop of the inductor), then you can do that, and the formula would be phiB_0 * N / I, but that unnecessarily complicates the underlying physics. I might even not resort to magnetic flux here at all, being a circuits course, and perhaps just start from inductance as a definition.

This lesson in general I find very confusing. What's Lenz's Law? Where are all these equations coming from? Why do we care about inductors? Who uses them? As with capacitors, there's an interesting history behind inductors, you might try starting there. I'd recommend the book "Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field". You might omit the definition of magnetic flux entirely, and discuss how it was found experimentally (and when this was found out it caused a massive ruckus and confusion and excitement). There's an apocryphal story about how Oersted (the scientist who discovered this), when giving a lecture noticed that when he turned on his circuit it caused a compass needle to deflect a little bit. When he turned it off, he saw the same thing, but the needle deflected in the other direction. It's a myth (you can make that disclaimer as a footnote), but it's a really good story that might serve as a good starting point.

As this contains time-domain stuff, I would move it to a later section after you've covered the basics about DC circuit analysis. It's very easy for you and I, but this is the first time a lot of students are seeing differential equations outside a calculus / diffyQ's class, and it's going to hit them like a ton of bricks.