CHAPTER 6 - Non-linear Transient Analysis (2)

Abstract

The central problem of electric circuit analysis is to determine the response of a circuit given its excitation. GCAP is a program capable of determining the steady state response of a linear network when the excitation is a sinusoidal function of time. The descriptive words steady state, linear, and sinusoidal are constraints defining a class of circuit problems which GCAP can solve. The excitation waveforms can be functions of time. The physical circuit elements, R, L, and C, can be nonlinear in that their value can be a function of some current or voltage. A circuit containing one or more nonlinear elements is itself non-linear. Non-linearity has many implications, principally (1) the excitation and response of the network are not related by a linear differential equation, so that the principle of superposition does not apply, and the Laplace transform technique cannot be used; and (2) the response of a non-linear network will contain frequency components not present in the excitation.