All courses › Electric Circuits › Superposition

Superposition

In a linear circuit with several independent sources you can find the current or voltage in a branch by adding the contribution from each source acting alone. To do this you turn off all the other sources: a voltage source is shorted to 0 V, and a current source is opened to 0 A. The method never applies directly to power, since power is quadratic in current and voltage.

Symbols

Example

$U_1=12$ V gives $I'=1.2$ A, $I_2=2$ A gives $I''=0.8$ A:

$I=I'+I''=1.2+0.8=2$ A.

← Active, Reactive and Apparent Power · Thévenin Equivalent →

Part of Electric Circuits: Network analysis.