ECEN 3400

Electromagnetic Fields and Waves

Fall 2008

Page last updated 2 October 2008

Instructors: Prof. Edward F. Kuester, Prof. Dejan S. Filipovic

TA

Announcements

3 September 2008: Here are the solutions to the entry exam. I corrected the wrong answer to problem 5 that was posted earlier.

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Course Information

General

In this course, you will be introduced to the behavior of electromagnetic fields, and will see some of the ways in which they are used in electrical engineering. The text is Introductory Electromagnetics, by Z. Popović, and B. Popović. A scanned copy of the Textbook in PDF format is available for download (be sure to check the errata file for a list of all known corrections to the text). To read PDF (Adobe's Portable Document Format) files, you can either use Ghostscript or Adobe's free Acrobat Reader. The supplementary volume Introductory Electromagnetics: Practice, Problems and Labs, by Z. Popović, and B. Popović may also be downloaded. This file has incorporated all known corrections up to the present time. As new corrections are found, I will update my files; the date of the latest revision is given at the beginning of each file.

If you are curious to learn more about electromagnetism, or to see the viewpoints of different textbooks, I have also put the following books on reserve at the Engineering Library:

• C. T. A. Johnk, Engineering Electromagnetic Fields and Waves. New York: Wiley, 1988.
• L. M. Magid, Electromagnetic Fields, Energy and Waves. New York: Wiley, 1972.
• J. D. Kraus, Electromagnetics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984 (other editions are good, too).

• MIT's OpenCourseWare for Physics 8.02 (Electricity and Magnetism)
• Handbook of Engineering Electromagnetics edited by R. Bansal
• Electricity and Magnetism by Benjamin Crowell
• Electromagnetic Fields and Energy by Haus and Melcher, coutesy of MIT's OpenCourseWare

CU Engineering Fellows (fellows.colorado.edu) offers review and study sessions for this course if interest is expressed.

In addition to the two lectures a week (Monday and Wednesday from 4:00-5:15 in room KOBL S127), you are also enrolled in one of the following lab/recitation sections, which meet in ECEE 254:

Grades

Your grade for the course will be determined as follows:

To pass the course your cummulative score must be above 60%. Specifically, your grade will be assigned according to the following score table:

We expect that you will abide by all University expectations of academic integrity. Please read the information on this, as well as on disabilities, religious observances and standards of behavior.

Entry Exam

ECE core courses administer an entry exam to all students, as a way of monitoring student preparedness to take the course and the success of the department's earlier courses. The entry exam for ECEN 3400 this semester will be administered in the lab sections on Wednesday August 27, 2008. The result of this exam does not affect your course grade in any way, but be sure to attend: not attempting the exam at all will cost you part of your course grade. This exam will provide us with important information about the material covered in prerequisite courses which is necessary background for what you will study in this course. In the case of ECEN 3400, we will test your retention of basic concepts from Circuits/Electronics 1 (ECEN 2250), Circuits/Electronics 2 (ECEN 2260) and Calculus 3 (APPM 2350) . Of particular importance are the transient and time-harmonic steady-state behavior of simple RC, RL and RLC networks, phasors, and the basics of vector algebra and vector calculus. You will receive your graded entry exams back, so that you can see which prerequisite areas you may be weak in, and thus can do any necessary review to better prepare you for this course.

Class preparation

You should read the assigned sections of the book prior to each lecture. We will always be glad to help you with any questions you may have during our office hours since there will not always be time for long answers during the lectures. Please feel free to come in for help. We hope the office hours will be such that everyone in the course can make use of at least some of them. In any case, you can also make an appointment to see us at other times. 

Homework

Homework assignments are due every Wednesday in the lecture period unless indicated to the contrary on the calendar below. They will be graded and returned to you in your recitation section. Please put your recitation section number next to your name on your homework, prelabs and exams (anything you turn in to be graded). It helps us resolve ambiguities when one of us has difficulty reading your handwriting. For example, if you are in the 12:00-1:50 section, label your homework "Recitation 012". Late homework is not accepted. You can turn homework in early by either putting them in Prof. Filipovic's mailbox in the ECE office (make sure to put them in the slot below his name), or giving them to your TA.

Software

Recitation

There are two meetings of your "lab" section held each week in ECEE 254. You are required to attend these sections every week (part of your grade is determined by attendance). One of these meetings (usually Monday) will be a 2 hour recitation. In it, you will go over homework problems from the previous week which will be returned to you then. The recitation section is meant to convey correct solutions to the homework problems in a more involved and less passive way than posting them or handing them out. We will not post homework solutions. You will also work through some new "recitation problems" related to new material covered in lecture that week. The quizees will be composed of theoretical questions. You will be given a study list a week before these exams and a few of those questions will be repeated. The final exam will be problems solving and it will cover the same topics as in the homework and recitation problems. Participating actively in recitation will go a long way toward helping you perform well in the examinations. The recitation grade is based on attendance, as well as on participation. Finally, recitation gives you a way to provide feedback on how the course is going via the TAs if you feel too intimidated by the professor. We meet with the TAs every week, and will be asking them about your concerns.

Lab

Many weeks, one meeting of the lab section will really be a lab (usually on Wednesday, but check the calendar to be certain). Labs also meet in room ECEE 254. There will be only 11 experiments this semester, so this meeting will not occur every week. In weeks when there is no experiment to do, we will use this time period to do something else, often a demonstration or additional recitation. In any case, attendance is mandatory at all meetings of the lab sections. If, with serious reason (medical emergencies qualify, workload from other courses does not) you miss one experiment, there will be an opportunity to make up one lab near the end of the semester. Homework (the "pre-lab") is assigned for each experiment, and is due at the beginning of your lab section each week. The purpose of the pre-labs is to allow you to perform the experiments with some background and insight, rather than by the seat of your pants. The prelab problems and lab descriptions are found in the supplementary volume Introductory Electromagnetics: Practice, Problems and Labs, by Z. Popović, and B. Popović.

The laboratory room, ECEE 254, that we use for this course differs from lab rooms you may have used in other courses. It is NOT an open laboratory. Please read and understand the lab rules. You are responsible for the proper use of the facilities. In particular, the computers in this lab are NOT  for general use (email, word processing, web browsing, etc.), but are dedicated as controllers for the microwave measurement instruments for senior and graduate labs. There are plenty of other computers around the department and college available for general use. Also note that ABSOLUTELY NO FOOD OR DRINK is allowed in this lab at any time.

Practice Problems

Below will be placed lists of problems which you should work on as an aid in learning material and studying for the exams.  It is to your advantage to work on these, and to seek help from us or the TAs if you have questions. We will not grade these individually, but we are willing to look at what you have done and point out what you may have done wrong.

Exams

There will be three in-class (45min) quizzes and a 2h 30min final exam. The quizees and final exam are closed-book and closed-notes, but you may two (for the final exam) 8-½" by 11" sheet(s) of notes and a calculator. The schedule of exams is listed in the calendar. Currently planned dates are 10/1, 10/27 and 12/3, but these are subject to minor changes if circumstances warrant. Quizees will be composed of theoretical questions, no problem solving. You will be given a list of questions a week before. Over 50% questions on the quizees will be from this list. Notes or calcuators will not be allowed. The final exam (2-½ hours long) will be held on Thursday, Dec 18, 2008 from 10:30am  to 1pm am in room KOBLS127. The final exam will be cumulative, but with emphasis on the final third of the course. Thus, half of the problems on the final exam will be on chapters 1-15 and 17, and the other half will be on the material from chapters 18-22 and 24-25. Two page-faces of notes and calcuators are allowed.

If you have 3 or 4 final exams on Thursday, Dec 18, you need to see the instructor(s) of the course(s) which have their final exams in the third (and possibly fourth) time slots of that day in a timely manner, to make arrangements to take those exams on a different day in accordance with University rules. The official deadline for doing so is ??.

Sample Exams and Worked Examples

Syllabus and Schedules

The calendar below gives a day by day list of lecture topics, reading and homework assignments, as well as what you will be doing in your lab and recitation sections. I will not announce these separately in class; it is your responsibility to check this page for all assignments and labs, and be prepared appropriately for each.

Calendar

Refer to lecture and reading assignment schedule for lecture topics and reading assignments, and lab schedule  for lab and prelab assignments.
Rec = Recitation/lab section; example problems to be worked are listed for each recitation. HW = Homework due that day.
Problems of the form Px.x are taken from the text; problems of the form EKx.x are from the supplemental homework problems provided in PDF format.
Homework assignments will not be changed when there is less than one week until they are due; otherwise they may be changed as needed.
If you like to do homework well ahead of time, be warned of this and check before turning in your assignment that you have done the correct problems.

August

September

October

November

December

Lecture and Reading Schedule (not yet finalized)

Lab Experiment Schedule

Some Free Programs of Interest

QuickField 

A "student version" of a program which can numerically solve (among other things) electrostatic and magnetostatic field problems. This version is limited as to problem size, but is free.

XLPlot

Windows Freeware. From the website: "Create your graphs for scientific publication with XL-Plot. It reads ascii files and it outputs a vector drawing. XL-Plot is for Windows 95,98, 2000 and XP. The primary purpose of XL-Plot is to create a figure for scientific publication rapidly. It contains a few basic statistical functions, such as Students t-test and linear correlation of two sets of data (two columns in a spreadsheet). XL-Plot has a number of built-in functions that can be fitted to the data in columns on a spreadsheet or to a curve in a graph. The user can easily add fitting functions of his own design.Additional options are Fourier Transformation, (de-)convolution and Matrix inversion." It is a modest piece of software that does a surprising number of tasks well.

Winplot

Another freeware plotting program for Windows, concentrating on the display of functions. This one can do 3D (surface) plots. It has some animation capabilities as well.

Euler

A freeware numerical mathematics program similar in many ways to Matlab. It is available for Windows, Linux, Unix and OS/2 (this latter is no longer maintained). May be worth a look, though I haven't really used it myself.

Scilab

A free mathematical software package for various Unix flavors and for Windows, somewhat more advanced in capabilities than Euler. It aims to do many of the same things as Matlab. From its website: "Scilab is a scientific software package for numerical computations in a user-friendly environment. It features:

• Elaborate data structures (polynomial, rational and string matrices, lists, multivariable linear systems,...).

• Sophisticated interpreter and programming language with Matlab-like syntax.

• Hundreds of built-in math functions (new primitives can easily be added).

• Stunning graphics (2d, 3d, animation).

• Open structure (easy interfacing with Fortran and C via online dynamic link).

• Many built-in libraries:

• Linear Algebra (including sparse matrices, Kronecker form, ordered Schur,...).

• Control (Classical, LQG, H-infinity,...).

• Package for LMI (Linear Matrix Inequalities) optimization.

• Signal processing.

• Simulation (various ode's, dassl,...).

• Optimization (differentiable and non-differentiable, LQ solver).

• Scicos, an interactive environment for modeling and simulation of dynamical systems.

• Metanet (network analysis and optimization).

• Symbolic capabilities through Maple interface.

• Parallel Scilab."

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