Filling the Teaching Gap between Electromagnetics and Circuits

Electrical engineers normally are taught electromagnetism in an electromagnetics course (e.g. in [1-2]), and circuit analysis in an independent course (e.g. in [4-6]). Circuits are dominated by Kirchhoff’s laws, while electromagnetics is dominated by Maxwell’s equations. However, the correspondence between two sets of equations is not immediately perceived and this creates some uncertainty in the young electrical or electronic engineer, which may grow with the doubt that Kirchhoff’s laws may be somewhat laws of the nature independent of the laws of electromagnetism. This paper has the purpose of supplying teaching material that may be used to fill the gap, and therefore be taught either at the end of an electromagnetics or at the beginning of a circuit course. It exploits large parts of the paper published in a conference [8], but also contains significant enhancements. The paper first shows simple distributed parameter systems, whose behaviour follows Maxwell’s equations, and then shows that they, under given assumptions, can be modelled as circuits, whose behaviour is governed by Kirchhoff’s laws.