Block Diagrams
What Is A Block Diagram?

What Is A Block Diagram?


Here are the relationships for this particular system.  (Click here for a review of signal relationships in a block diagram.)

        Next, you can combine all of those relationships and get an overall relationship between the input and the output in the system.  Here is the process.         That's what you need to know, and the final relationship will allow you to compute the output given knowledge of the system components and the input.

        What if you have a more complex system?  Here is a block diagram of a slightly more complex system.

A description of this system is as follows.

        Now, notice that the output has two components.  One of those components is due to the input - something we know about.  The other component of the output is due to the threshold voltage - something we might not have expected.

        What do we make of all this?  Actually, representing offsets and thresholds like this is a particularly good way to incorporate some simple nonlinearities into our block diagram algebra even though the block diagram representation was originally used only for linear systems.  It's not hard to incorporate those offsets into your analysis.  Here's what you can do.

  1. Generate a complete block diagram for the system and be sure that you incorporate all of the offsets in your block diagram model.
  2. Using your block diagram model write out the algebraic equations for each block.
  3. Solve the equations you have written to determine the output of the system (or the error if that is what you are interested in).  Note that the output will probably depend upon the input and all of the offset quantities you added.
  4. Use the solution to determine numerical values for the output.  Remember, you are often interested in steady state solutions (DC solutions) and you can get that by using DC gains with s = 0 in your transfer functions.