Transistor Switching

Introduction:
The purpose of this lab is to test and measure the effects of transistor switching in a circuit.
Procedure:
In the first part of the lab we set up the circuit below to switch a LED on and off with our fingertip.  As long as a voltage can be amplified at the transistor and provide current to the LED it lights up.

In the next part we used a POT to regulate the voltage at A1 and measured the current at A2. These were our results. The graph of Ic vs Ib gave us the gain (Beta) as the slope of the line being 2.4253.

 

Conclusion:

Transistors make a gain that is related to the ratio of currents in and out of them and allow for rapid switching in the circuit. The transistor did not saturate in our experiment but this model has a listed saturation at 10mA at the collector.