Modulation of Sinusoids to Increase the Functionality of Root Mean Square Measurements

by Adam Bowman

Submitted : Fall 2018

My project applies a common tool used within the field of electrical engineering along with mathematical concepts that were taught during this semester.  The tool I chose to focus on is the Root Mean Square measurement of a signal. The Root Mean Square, or RMS, of a signal is a basic signal processing technique that can be used to extract meaningful information about the power of an alternating current.  This measurement can be used to pick the values of electrical components when designing a circuit or system driven by an alternating current. The information that an RMS measurement can give depends on the geometry of the measured signal. As it turns out, the RMS of sinusoidal wave shapes can only give amplitude information about the signal.  My hypothesis was that I could use simple modulation technique on a sine wave signal to extract information about the signal in addition to the amplitude component. The resulting paper goes into detail about the techniques I used in an attempt to accomplish this task, as well as some of the unexpected results that were found during the process.

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