Animating transmission-line transients with BOUNCE

This paper presents the program BOUNCE for animating transients on transmission lines. BOUNCE is used for classroom demonstrations of fundamental concepts such as traveling wave, reflected wave, reflection from an unmatched load, and transmission through junctions and branches. BOUNCE provides a "laboratory" for students to use in verifying homework exercises solved with a lattice diagram. BOUNCE is used to demonstrate fundamental principles of logic design, such as ringing because of mismatch at high-impedance gate inputs, the effect of gate-input capacitance, and the effect of logic-gate rise time. BOUNCE graphically demonstrates the transition to the sinusoidal steady state and the concept of a standing wave, as the result of an unmatched load, as an introduction to solving transmission lines with phasors. This paper describes the operation of the BOUNCE program and then discusses various classroom demonstrations and the associated homework exercises.