DC NETWORK THEOREMS PART - 03 – NORTON’S THEOREM

EDWARD LAWRY NORTON

A Bell labs engineer and scientist famous for developing the concept of the Norton equivalent circuit was born on July 29, 1898 in USA.

He served as a radio operator in the US Navy between 1917 and 1919 and he received his electrical engineering degree from M.I.T in 1922 and his master’s degree from Columbia University in 1925.

He remained with Bell Labs throughout his career, retiring in 1963. He wrote three technical papers, obtained 18 patents and he wrote 92 technical reports during his career.

Norton was one of the legendary figure in network theory, who brought out a prodigious number of designs armed only with a slide rule and his intuition.

He applied his deep knowledge of circuit analysis in many fields, and after World War II, he worked on Nike missile guidance systems.

He died on January 28, 1983 at the King James Nursing Home in Chatham, New Jersey.

He lived for 85 years in this planet and even today he lives in the form of his theorem in basic electrical and electronics textbooks.

Norton's Theorem is the converse of Thevenin's theorem. It consists of an equivalent current source in parallel to the internal resistance of the network.

NORTON’S THEOREM

Any two linear active bilateral networks can be replaced by an equivalent current source in parallel to a resistance. The current source being the short circuited current through the load terminals and the resistance being the internal resistance of the source network looking through the open circuited load terminals.

[OR]

Any two terminal linear network containing independent voltage and current sources, may be replaced by a constant current source IN in parallel with a resistance RN where IN is the current flowing through a short circuit placed across the terminals and RN is the equivalent resistance of the network as seen from the two terminals with all sources replaced by their internal resistances.