Development and implementation of an analysis tool for direct current electrical circuits

Abstract

AbstractElectrical circuits constitute the core of many courses at the undergraduate level in electrical and electronics engineering. For most undergraduate students, learning and analyzing such circuits are a difficult process. A significant drawback of Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE)‐based simulation tools in terms of e‐learning is that they only generate circuit simulation outputs, such as the current and voltage of electrical elements contained in a particular circuit. The users are not provided with the detailed information about the steps that are followed to obtain the related outputs. This study describes the development of a new software tool, called ECDAT (a shorthand for the Electrical Circuit Description and Analysis Tool), which can serve as a practical component of electrical circuits courses. The developed tool currently analyzes simple direct electric circuits in a similar way as the existing circuit analysis and simulation ones, and it produces an output document that includes the certain equations and intermediate calculations, using the well‐known circuit laws differently from the previous works. Another contribution of the study is that, unlike the modified nodal analysis method used in SPICE‐based circuit analysis programs, it employs a graph analysis method for circuit analysis.