Magnetic-Electric Analogs
by Dennis L. Feucht
Innovatia Laboratories
Circuit designers are usually able to think more easily about the circuit behavior of capacitors than inductors. Inductance is the dual of capacitance; exchange v and i in capacitor equations and they apply to inductors. This dualism can be extended to circuit laws too, and the three most basic laws of circuits have magnetic counterparts. We will derive and examine them.
Electric and Magnetic Dualism
We learn early that the voltage across a capacitor cannot change instantaneously
because it takes time for current to change the charge and hence the voltage.
The dual for inductors is that the current in an inductor cannot change
instantaneously because it takes time for the voltage across an inductor
to change it.
...download entire
article in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format (38 KB)
Contact the author