What are Inductors?
Inductors are electrical devices used in a number of applications, particularly radio frequency circuits. Inductors are closely related to capacitors and can in many ways be considered their opposite. In a capacitor, the energy is determined by the capacitance and the voltage, while in an inductor, the equation is the same, except that inductance replaces capacitance. Inductors are labeled by their rate of inductance, which is given in the standard unit of henrys (H). An easy one-to-one definition of henrys can be found by taking an inductor of 1 henry and running 1 volt across it, which will result in a current increasing by 1 amp/s. We can present this as an equation of V = L(di/dt), where V is the voltage, L is a measurement of henrys, di is a change in current, and dt is a rate of time. The most basic inductors are simply tightly wrapped coils of wire. Usually, inductors are wrapped around some sort of core material in order to increase the inductance of the wire. Iron is far and a
Inductors are nothing more than energy storage devices just like capacitors. The difference between them is simply the way they store the energy. Inductance is measured in Henries. Inductors store energy in the form of a magnetic field and the amount of energy (in joules) stored in an inductor is given by: Eq. 1 If we plot a graph of the energy stored by various inductors of different values we can see that there is more energy stored in them when there is more current regardless of the other inductors being of higher values. This is because the energy stored in the inductors grows exponentially with respect to the current through them but only grows linearly with respect to the inductance value. The energy that can be stored in an inductor unfortunately is not infinite, it has a limit and it’s reached when the inductor saturates. But we will get into that later. Properties of an inductor: Something that we must always keep in mind are the properties of inductors. Here I list them sepa
