This course is called AC circuits. And it will provide the students with a basic understanding of what alternating current is all about. And it will provide some of the tools that are required to work with basic AC circuits. It is a standalone course. And it is made to provide the student with the information that he he or she might be looking for in a way of working with AC circuits. However, it's highly recommended that the course basic electricity which is on this site as well be a prerequisite for this course, because it provides some of the basic understanding that is required when continuing on with AC circuits.

The course will start out with a basic understanding of what an AC wave form looks like and define what a sinusoidal wave form is. It will also look at how two forms of an AC wave form, namely a voltage and a current might be lined up on a time graph. And it'll start to talk about things such as phase shifting, and how do we describe these AC quantities? We then very quickly get into defining what RMS is the root mean square of voltages and currents and power. And we very quickly develop an understanding of what a new electrical vector is, which is called a phaser. We go on to describe the what a phaser is and the characteristics of a phaser Namely its length and its frequency and how it rotates about the tail and the relative phase angles of the various phasers that are out there.

The two ways that a phaser is described then are studied. And the first one is the polar notation where a phaser is described by its magnitude and its angle. And the second way that a phaser is described is by rectangular notation. And we get into such things as talking about the J operator. And the fact that this phasor would have a real and an imaginary part due to its description on the rectangular notation plane. From there we go on to Talk about reactance and impedance we can define what reactance and impedance is and then we start to analyze what resistive inductive and capacitive circuits are, which are RLC circuits.

The two components that give an AC circuit reactance are then looked at and defined starting with the Holland inductor reacts to an AC circuit. And we very quickly define what reactance for an inductor is. And we have a formula for defining what that reactance is given the frequency of oscillations of the circuit as well as the inductance that we're dealing with. From there we go on to put it in a circuit with Some resistance and then we very quickly are able to define what impedance is as it relates to a resistor inductive circuit. The other component that provides reactance to a circuit is also described and that is a capacitor. And the reactance is defined for a capacitor in terms of the frequency of the oscillations of the circuit as well as the capacitance in fed of that reactance quantity.

And like the inductor We will then put the capacitor reactance in series with a resistor and come up with a term for the impedance of a series circuit with a resistor and a capacitor. Why once we've worked with these two reactants, For an AC circuit, the inductance and capacitance and we certainly have worked with the resistor before we move on to power flow in AC circuit. In looking at electric power, we go through several samples and scenarios of different power circuits using a combination of resistors and reactance. And we very quickly come to the conclusion that there are several ways of measuring power from instantaneous to average to real power or reactive power. Bottom line is that in industry, we usually want to come up with what is termed useful power that is the actual power. It's being converted into heat or mechanical energy.

And we devise a formula for that p average, which is equal to the the equation that you see there from here we go on to define the phasers, real power reactive power and apparent power and we show how they are related. This leads us to the development of using RMS values for this working value for p average and how we use RMS values for calculating the the reactive power and for calculating the apparent power. The last thing that we talk about in this chapter is what harmonic frequency is and what happens when a generator generates what is known as resonant frequency into a car. combination of capacitor and an inductor. Some of the oddities that come out of that are very interesting and we have a look at that just before closing off this chapter. This ends the introduction for this course, I've just touched on some of the subjects that we're going to be covering during it.

The course is very interesting and I encourage you to tap into it and follow it through