Reverse engineering of RLC circuits using Matlab: An experiment for electrical circuits course

Identifying the contents of a black-box electrical circuit is a challenging experiment. In this paper, we present an approach for identifying the topological structure of the circuit and estimating the values of the internal components, by applying input signals and measuring available signals. The black-box model is provided as a Simulink model, whose contents are not accessible to the students. The overall procedure is performed in Matlab/Simulink environment and the results are obtained for a given circuit and compared with the actual values. The experiment is performed by a group of undergraduate students and the assessment results show its effectiveness in challenging their knowledge.