Electrical Engineering › Section Y · Time-varying fields, Maxwell's equations, and plane waves › Topic Y.9
Wave polarization and wave power
Two practical questions follow any wave from transmitter to receiver: which way does its electric field point, and how much power does it carry? Polarisation answers the first and decides whether an antenna can catch the wave at all; the Poynting vector answers the second.
In this topic
- What polarisation means
- Linear polarisation
- Circular polarisation
- Which hand?
- Worked example: naming the hand
- Elliptical polarisation and why it matters
- The Poynting vector
- Average power density
- Worked example: power from a field
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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