Electric transients

✍ Scribed by Charles Proteus Steinmetz

• Book ID: 104117344
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1911
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 755 KB
• Volume: 172
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0016-0032
• DOI: 10.1016/s0016-0032(11)90404-9

✦ Synopsis

I. WITrI the increasing size and importance of electrical systems, those phenomena, which temporarily occur in all electrical circuits, as oscillations, surges, electrical impulses and travelling waves, are becoming of increasing frequency and destructiveness, and a knowledge and understanding of their general nature and characteristics, and the cause of their origin, has become important and necessary for the electrical engineer.

While the theory of these electrical transients is still far from complete, and involves considerable mathematics, it is possible to gain an insight into their cause and origin, their nature and general characteristics, and even their most important numerical relations, without theoretical mathematics, and in view of the great and rapidly increasing importance of these phenomena, in the following an attempt is made to give without the use of mathematics a general discussion of them, and their bearing on the operation of electrical systems.

2. In general, an electric circuit comprises a source or generator, a line and a load. In the generator, electric power is produced from some other form of power, as mechanical, and flows over the line into the load where it is used. Not all the electric power produced by the generator reaches the load, but a part is consumed throughout the entire circuit, dissipated as heat by the resistance of the conductor: ri2

This however does not yet constitute the entire phenomena which we will call the flow of electric power, but there also is something going on in the space outside of the conductor which directs the flow of electric power: there is a magnetic tleld, lines of magnetic force encircle the conductor; and there also is an electrostatic or dielectric Keld, lines of electrostatic or dielectric force radiate from the conductor, and the magnetic field, and the electrostatic or dielectric field in the space outside of the conductor are just as essential parts of the flow of the electric power, as the power dissipation in the resistance of the conductor.