Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2018/section-c/11/solution

Complex impedance. In sinusoidal steady state write physical voltage and electric current as real parts of and . The electrical impedance is a ratio of phasors; its magnitude gives the voltage-to-current amplitude ratio and its argument gives their phase difference. It is measured in ohms.
For an ideal capacitor, and . Consequently , giving
With this time convention the voltage lags the electric current by .
Bridge output. The original diagram has and in parallel in the upper-left arm, and and in series in the lower-left arm. The point labelled is connected to the upper supply node. Set the lower supply node to zero, so . Assuming the measured output draws negligible electric current, the two voltage dividers give
Their difference is therefore
The reactive-arm electrical impedances are
Balance. Setting and cross-multiplying gives . For this Wien bridge,
The right-hand side must be the real number . Equating imaginary and real parts gives
Positive capacitances require . In the equal-component case and , this reduces to
Band-pass output and phase. Preserve the requested voltage polarity: . Since ,
Put . The equal-component ratio is , so the Wien bridge band-pass response is
At finite positive frequency, its imaginary part vanishes exactly when . Thus
The magnitude is maximal there and tends to zero at both frequency extremes, as expected for a band-pass filter.
A convenient continuous, unwrapped wave phase is
It decreases from as , passes through at , and tends to as . A principal-value plot instead jumps from to at resonance; both represent the same phasor. Reversing the output to would shift the phase by and make the resonant ratio , but that is a different output polarity from the one printed.
Figure 1.
Band-pass magnitude and continuous phase for the printed output polarity VA minus VC
. Details.

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