PSpiceLab

In this brief lab assignment we were asked to use PSpice for in order for us to do a specific circuit simulation. But since I have a Macintosh computer at home, I was unable to download PSpice. Instead, I purchased a $10.00 app at Apple's app store and I downloaded iCircuit. I found this circuit simulation software to be much more intuitive and appealing to use than PSpice.

Our instructor gave us a circuit diagram to make Thevenin and Norton measurements across the load resistor. Here are the photos of the circuit, along with their corresponding "multimeter" measurements.

I drew my circuit, and set my load resistor equal to 999Tohms, which for all intents and purposes is an open circuit at the load and can be considered to contain infinite resistance. The "multimeter" reading in the photo below the circuit gave a reading of 10V at the load. So my open circuit VTh value came out to be 10 V.

Next, I short circuited the load to determine my INorton value. Again here are the circuit and it's corresponding multimeter reading. As you can see in both the circuit diagram and the multimeter reading, the short circuit current through the load was measured to be at INorton= 3 A.

Last but not least, I replaced the resistor back into the load, and set it arbitrarily equal to 1 ohm.  Our goal now was to determine the RTh=RNorton value. As you can see in the multimeter reading below, the current across the 1 ohm load resistor was measured to be at 2.308 A. Furthermore, from the VTh value measured earlier, I was able to compute the Rth=RNorton= Vth/I= 10V/2.308A=4.33 ohms.

So this concluded the Thevenin and Norton equivalents portion of the lab assignment. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, my relative lack of access to PSpice, and also due to being a novice to the iCircuit app software, I was unable to create a graph in order to determine the maximum power transfer to the load. From the discussions that I had with my classmates, even many of those who use a Windows computer had trouble creating their graphs on PSpice. So in a sense I'm a bit relieved as a result.