EC 301 Homepage
This page contains general information about the course and some on
line
reading material to supplement the textbooks and the class lectures.
Introduction
EC 301 is the department's course on Electromagnetic Fields and
Waves. All of you have already had a course on Electricity and
Magnetism
in the Second Semester. This course follows up on that course and
introduces
more advanced ideas. A substantial part of the course will be on waves
and radiation.
Text Books for Course
The course has several text books, but none are totally satisfactory.
The main text book is:
- Ramo, Whinnery and Van Duzer, "Fields and Waves in Communcation
Electronics," 3rd Ed, John Wiley and Sons (Asia) Pvt. Ltd., 2002.
This book is sometimes cryptic. For another source of the same material
at a simpler level:
- Hayt and Buck, "Engineering Electromagnetics" (available in low
cost ed, I will provide the details later).
This book is really excellent. It leaves out the maths, and if you are
unable to grasp some topic, this is a good place to go back and
review.
The classic book to refer to when the above do not give enough
information is
- Jackson, J.D., "Classical Electrodynamics," 2nd ed., Wiley
Eastern Pvt. Ltd., New York, 1975.
However, beware that some editions of this text use cgs units.
Personally I feel that they make far better sense than SI units.
However, they may confuse those not used to that system.
Finally, the books that anyone serious about physics must read at some
point in their career, though they are never suitable as a text:
- Feynmann Lectures in Physics, Volume II
This is the ultimate source for insight into fields and waves. Won't
get you through the exams though.
Syllabus
The rough syllabus for the course is given
below. The syllabus differs a little from that for the second year
students who will be taught by Anil Prahbakar and Bijoy Das Gupta. I
will continue to put material into the site as I cover topics. The
goal is to redo difficult parts or put down derivations that are
tedious if done in class.
- Week1: Review. Coulomb's Law, Electric Field. Charge density. Gauss's Law and Divergence.
- Week2: Electrostatic Potential, Poisson's Equation
- Existence and Uniqueness, Capacitance, Electrostatic
Energy. Coordinate Systems, Boundary Value Problems.
- Problems
on Electrostatics
- Assignment
1
- Vector Calculus
- Magnetostatics. Ampere's
Law, Vector Potential, Force on a moving charge.
- Problems
in Magnetostatics
- Week5: Fields in Materials. Origin of relative
permitivity
and permeability.
Effect on field equations. Anisotropy, memory, nonlinearity and
hysterisis.
Extending solutions across a boundary.
- Problems
in Dielectrics
- Quiz 1
solution
- Faraday's Law. Motional EMF, Stokes theorem for
moving boundaries,
Inductance, Mutual Inductance, Energy in the Magnetic Field.
- Maxwell's Equations: Displacement Current, wave
equation. Wave equation
in the presence of sources. Wave equation in the presence of
self-consistent
sources.
- Week8: Poynting Theorem.
Decay of radiation fields with distance.
- Plane Wave Propagation: Group and Phase
velocity. Slowly varying backgrounds.
- Reflection, Refraction and Transmission of Waves at a
Boundary: Normal incidence. Oblique incidence. Brewster angle.
- Waveguides: Guided waves. Separation
of variables. TE, TM and TEM modes. Group delay dispersion.
- Questions on waveguides, Faraday's Law
and Skin Effect
- Transmission Lines: Identifying V and I from
TEM modes. Transmission line equation. Solution of equation. Sources
and loads. Practical transmission line geometries. VSWR. Smith Charts.
Single and double stub arrangements. Transmission line networks.
- Radiation by circuits, antennas.