3 ms·

Might be an unpopular opinion but my advice as an electronics engineer would be to try and move away from water analogies as quickly as possible. While they can

Might be an unpopular opinion but my advice as an electronics engineer would be to try and move away from water analogies as quickly as possible. While they can be useful at the start for some basic concepts, I feel like trying to relate everything to hydraulic concepts (or springs) makes it harder to understand things in the long run when you start looking at concepts where the analogies don't work as well.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
What would be a better visualization?
- stephen_g 6y ago
  What I’m saying is that it’s best to get to the point where you can reason more directly about voltage, current, charge, inductance etc. Part of that is getting comfortable with the maths, and the way that’s visualised is just equations, graphs and sometimes things like diagrams of fields or heatmaps. I work in RF so we do antenna simulations and things like that, and the software generates radiation pattern diagrams in 2D, or in 3D heatmaps showing the energy density. It just doesn’t work to, say, try and think of what would happen if an antenna was spraying water out or something.
somewhereoutth 6y ago
I have only a passing understanding of both, but enough to appreciate the (limited as you say) intuitive resemblances - can anyone enlighten me as to what are the fundamental mathematical differences between modelling electronics and water?
- kd5bjo 6y ago
  If you keep the water slow enough to stay in laminar flow and the electronic scales large enough to avoid quantum effects, electronic and hydraulic components have an essentially 1:1 correspondence. The biggest difference is in mechanical effects: in hydraulics, physical force is primarily a function of the system pressure and velocity of the flow rate. For electromagnetics, those are reversed: voltage controls the speed of a motor and current controls the force, for example. They also deviate from the linear regime in different ways, which means the more interesting components have to be built completely differently to perform the same job. A one-way check valve and a diode are both governed by similar equations on a macro scale, but you’ll never be able to understand the internal structure of the valve by an electronic analogy or the design of the diode by a hydraulic one.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

What would be a better visualization?

stephen_g 6y ago
What I’m saying is that it’s best to get to the point where you can reason more directly about voltage, current, charge, inductance etc. Part of that is getting comfortable with the maths, and the way that’s visualised is just equations, graphs and sometimes things like diagrams of fields or heatmaps. I work in RF so we do antenna simulations and things like that, and the software generates radiation pattern diagrams in 2D, or in 3D heatmaps showing the energy density. It just doesn’t work to, say, try and think of what would happen if an antenna was spraying water out or something.

somewhereoutth 6y ago

I have only a passing understanding of both, but enough to appreciate the (limited as you say) intuitive resemblances - can anyone enlighten me as to what are the fundamental mathematical differences between modelling electronics and water?

kd5bjo 6y ago
If you keep the water slow enough to stay in laminar flow and the electronic scales large enough to avoid quantum effects, electronic and hydraulic components have an essentially 1:1 correspondence. The biggest difference is in mechanical effects: in hydraulics, physical force is primarily a function of the system pressure and velocity of the flow rate. For electromagnetics, those are reversed: voltage controls the speed of a motor and current controls the force, for example. They also deviate from the linear regime in different ways, which means the more interesting components have to be built completely differently to perform the same job. A one-way check valve and a diode are both governed by similar equations on a macro scale, but you’ll never be able to understand the internal structure of the valve by an electronic analogy or the design of the diode by a hydraulic one.