"how are harmonics generated? The signal is just "on" or "off", how are there first, third, and fifth harmonics and why do they get weaker?" // Although not a satisfactory answer, you could accept the fact that any physically realizable continuous-time signal can be represented as an infinite sum of sinusoids (that's a Fourier series). Thus, any sinusoidal signal doesn't have harmonics, or it ...
For a fully symmetric waveform the even harmonics should cancel out but any departure from symmetry will cause the even harmonics to become present. Ultimately the spectrum for a repeated impulse is a descending set of both odd and even harmonics with amplitude inversely proportional to harmonic number.
Does that help you understand that a squarewave (which contains multiple harmonics of its fundamental frequency) will produce a comb like spectra in the spectrum.
There is no active power by higher harmonics, since the voltage does not have higher harmonics. And the same is true for reactive power of both fundamental and higher harmonics: this is zero for the fundamental harmonic since the voltage and current are in-line.
According to the Fourier series, when AC waves of different frequencies are added to the fundamental frequency, we can obtain waves such as square and sawtooth. When we filter out the harmonics in ...
I am told that even harmonics are not found in functions with half-wave symmetry. Yet, why do functions like cosine (2t) and cosine (4t) exhibit half-wave symmetry.
The answers to the question 'How do harmonics work?' were most interesting. OK, that's the HOW it happens. But WHY does it happen ? What is the physics here ? Why doesn't a guitar string vibrat...