#phasors

I can try!

A phasor like this tells you that you’ve got a sinusoidal voltage with a peak value of 10 V at a phase angle of 30 degrees. It doesn’t tell you anything about frequency, just the magnitude of the waveform and how far it’s shifted off a normal sine wave. Here’s the same voltage in trigonometric form. Again, we know nothing about frequency - that information would have to be given to us to write this complete.

Adding or subtracting phasors is complicated, and you’re better off converting your phasors to complex form to do it. But when you want to multiply or divide, phasors are way easier to work with than complex forms. If you’re multiplying two phasors together, their magnitudes multiply and their angles add. Likewise, if you’re dividing one phasor into another, the magnitudes divide and the angles subtract.

Here’s an example. We’ve got an AC voltage source hooked up to an impedance of some kind, and we want to find the current flowing through the circuit. It’s nothing new, just Ohm’s Law, only this time, we’ll use phasor algebra, since we’re dealing with AC stuff.

If you do have phasors you want to add or subtract, like I said, you’re better off converting them to complex form. Here’s the way to do it. It’s kind of a pain to memorize, but the algebra itself isn’t bad.

Here’s an example - we’ve got the same circuit as before, only this time we have a couple of impedances in it. We’d like to combine them into one and find the current like before. Since we need to add impedances, we’ll convert them to complex form. Once we’re done, we’ll convert back to a phasor to do the division and get a current.

Okay, here's my brief explanation of phasors for my lovely anon. (Sorry it took so long!) I'm not sure if you had any specific issues or examples you wanted me to run through, but I would be glad to run through anything more specific with them.

Now then, since the whole reason for using phasors is to make math easier, we have operations for each of these forms, and obviously different forms work better for different operations.

Mostly I wasn't quite sure what specifically was confusing you with them, but here's the basics of them summed up. I used the 4th Edition of Fundamentals of Electrical Circuits by Charles K. Alexander and Matthew N.O. Sadiku, and their section on phasors begins on page 376.