Electrical Engineering › Section I · Sinusoidal waveforms and phasors › Topic I.7
Complex numbers in rectangular and polar form
Every sinusoid in an ac circuit carries two pieces of information, a size and a phase angle. Complex numbers carry exactly two pieces of information too, and their arithmetic does the work of adding and scaling sinusoids. This topic is the toolkit; the next one, "Phasors", puts it to use.
In this topic
- Why ac needs complex numbers
- The imaginary unit j
- Rectangular form
- Polar form
- Converting between forms
- Worked example: conversions
- Adding, subtracting, conjugates and reciprocals
- Multiplying and dividing
- Worked example: all four operations
- Calculators and software
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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