Nodal Analysis

In this lab, we used nodal analysis to calculate and analyze a circuit. It works well when the circuit does not have a lot of nodes. The following pictures show the circuit we worked on, which only consists of 5 nodes. by setting one of them to ground voltage, four nodes out of the five nodes have a known voltage. This method significantly reduces the number of variables. The only unknown is the node indicated with V1 in the following graph.

The theoretical voltages are listed on the left side of the first picture. The experimental resistance and voltage values are marked on the circuit graph in the second picture. We made a table to calculate the percent difference between theoretical voltage and experimental voltage for each resistor.

	Theoretical Values	Experimental Values	% difference
V across 10 K ohm	5.53	5.52	0.18%
V across 22 K ohm	4.47	4.37	2.28%
V across 6.8 K Ohm	2.47	2.42	2.06%

Summary: The nodal analysis provides an alternative solution to complex circuit problems. Instead of using Kirchoff's Laws for every single circuit, nodal analysis enables us to find the unknowns in a faster way in some circuits. Circuits with many nodes and voltage sources are very suitable for the nodal analysis method. This experiment gives me a visualization of the nodal analysis method.