Nt1310 Unit 3 Lab

Physics 52: Lab #2 Oscilloscope and Diodes

Ziyu Liao

8/31/15

Honor Code Pledge:

In this lab, we were introduced to the Oscilloscope and Diodes. In first part of this lab we continued our exploration of the current, resistance, voltage, and the breadboard. In the first part, I tested the resistance of multiple people, build a parallel circuit, measured the effects of a parallel circuit on current, and explored the characteristics of a diode. In the second part of the lab, I was introduced the Oscilloscope and the importance of the Oscilloscope in measuring electricity.

Task A: In this part, I measured the resistance of myself and two other classmates. I held both the positive and negative ends of the DVM and set

The circuit consists of a 12 V power supply leading to a 5 K-ohms resistor then to two resistors with resistances of 1 K-ohm and 1.5 K-ohms build in parallel. The initial current of the current was measured at 2.05 M-amps and I2 and I3 were measured at 1.3 M-amps and .8 M-amps respectively. This makes sense as 1.3 M-amps + .8 M-amps is roughly equivalent to 2.05 M-amps, or the initial current. The voltage of the power supply was measured at 12 V. Lastly, I used Ohms law to calculate for the values of current I2 and I3 and they were within tolerance of the calculated

On channel one, I set the peak-to-peak amplitude to 5V however on channel two, because of the diode, the peak-to-peak amplitude dropped significantly to 1.2V. The graph of channel two appeared to have much less variance and inconsistencies compared to a sine function without the diode, and the diode made the current much more like DC power instead of AC power. This experiment showcases the ability of diodes to rectify and convert current from an AC power source to DC.

Special Credit: In this exercise, I connected two diodes with opposite polarities to the Oscilloscope. I expected the diodes to limited the range of the sine wave, and make the amplitude of the sine wave smaller. The input function should look like a normal sine wave, but the output should look like a sine wave function with some parts of the top and bottom cut off. Lastly, as I increased the voltage of the power source, the amplitude of the sine wave gotten bigger, but was still limited by the