The first exercise was to simulate this circuit:
Once the circuit was built, PSpice immediately gave us values for the current through each element and voltages through each node.
The next part was to determine the Thevenin equivalent for the circuit:
Instead of just simply analyzing the circuit, we had to perform a DC sweep on the bottom current source (I3) . This puts I3 onto the x-axis of the graph. We wanted to observe the voltage as a function of current and obtained the following graph:
The graph tells us that when the current is zero (open circuit), the Thevenin voltage is 10 V. The slope of the graph gives us the Thevenin resistance, which is 3.33 Ω. The graph also tells us that when the voltage is zero (short circuit), the Norton current is 3 A.
The last part of the activity was to replace I3 with a variable resistor to show that maximum power transfer occurs when the variable resistor equals to the Thevenin resistance. This was our result:
As expected, our peak occurs when the variable resistance is 3.3 Ω.
As opposed to performing tedious calculations by hand, PSpice is a convenient tool in analyzing circuits and other properties of a circuit.
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