Section 5.6 · Further exercises · 16 of 20
Exercise 5.6.16: Power that flows backwards part of the time
About the further exercises of Section 5.6
Twenty further exercises in the spirit of the problems, the worked examples and the home exercises, graded from easy to harder within two groups. Exercises 5.6.1–5.6.10 belong to the lecture: Exercises 5.6.1–5.6.2 are about phasors and the phase velocity, 5.6.3–5.6.5 about the complex permittivity and the wave number, 5.6.6–5.6.7 about the Helmholtz equation and 5.6.8–5.6.10 about power. Exercises 5.6.11–5.6.20 belong to the exercise lecture: reading time-harmonic fields, loops, mixers and receivers, power, and the medium found from measurements. They use only
and, from Section 6.1, the instantaneous and the complex Poynting vectors and , with , and the time-harmonic Poynting relation
with the time-average energy densities and (real , ). For a wave every becomes , so Faraday's law gives . A small loop of turns and area in a field of angular frequency picks up an emf of amplitude , with its normal.
Power that flows backwards part of the time
#A wave travels along in a nonmagnetic medium with and . At , . (a) Find and the intrinsic impedance . (b) Find . (c) Find the instantaneous Poynting vector , its average, and its largest forward and backward values. (d) During what fraction of each period does the power flow towards ? Compare with a lossless medium.
In a lossy medium is complex, , so lags by . The product of two cosines that are out of step is negative whenever they have opposite signs, so reverses for part of the period while its average stays positive.
and , so . Then and
For a wave along , , so the phasor at is :
With and ,
The average is , the largest forward value and the largest backward value .
when , that is when lies in an interval of length around (mod ). runs through per period, so the backward time is of the period:
Directly: and have opposite signs for and , out of . That is per period of , in two pieces of (the shaded intervals of the figure).
In a lossless medium and : the power pulsates at but never reverses. With loss, is the reactive part , the amplitude of the energy that sloshes back and forth on top of the steady flow.
cf. Problem 5.6.8