Thevinin Equivalent Lab

The Thevinin lab is designed to familiarize participants with the real life applications of Thevenin's theorem. In reality, circuits are not as simple as the ones shown for practice problems in electronic engineering classes. Thevinin's theorem allowed for every circuit no matter how complicated to be essentially be broken down into a single voltage source in series with a resistor.

The picture above shows the circuit as it was set up to be just a Thevenin equivalent circuit. Measurements were then taken.

CONFIG	THEO VALUE	MEASURED	% Error
RL2=RL2,min	8	7.68	4%
RL2=Infinite	8	8.50	8%

Overall, the percent error for the following lab was a little higher than usual. This was due to various factors such as resistors being off by +/-5%. The most expensive thing in engineering is precision and since most commercial ventures do not have an unlimited budget to purchase near perfect parts, most will try to limit error percentages by building more efficient circuits. One observation made from this lab is that reducing error in a circuit can sometimes mean using more resistors in parallel and series to minimize error by spreading it out among multiple components instead of gambling on one.