TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter is an introduction to circuits in which the applied voltage or current are sinusoidal. The time and frequency domains are defined and phasor relationships are developed for resistive, inductive and capacitive circuits. Reactance, susceptance, impedance and admittance are also defined. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with sinusoids and complex numbers. If not, it is strongly recommended that Appendix B is reviewed thoroughly before reading this chapter.
The applied voltages and currents in electric circuits are generally referred to as excitations or driving functions, that is, we say that a circuit is "excited" or "driven" by a constant, or a sinusoidal, or an exponential function of time. Another term used in circuit analysis is the word response; this may be the voltage or current in the "load" part of the circuit or any other part of it. Thus the response may be anything we define it as a response. Generally, the response is the voltage or current at the output of a circuit, but we need to specify what the output of a circuit is.
In Chapters 1 through 4 we considered circuits that consisted of excitations (active sources) and resistors only as the passive devices. We used various methods such as nodal and mesh analyses, superposition, Thevenin's and Norton's theorems to find the desired response such as the voltage and/or current in any particular branch. The circuit analysis procedure for these circuits is the same for DC and AC...
