Birkhoffian formulation of the dynamics of LC circuits

We present a formulation of general nonlinear LC circuits within the framework of Birkhoffian dynamical systems on manifolds. We develop a systematic procedure which allows, under rather mild non-degeneracy conditions, to write the governing equations for the mathematical description of the dynamics of an LC circuit as a Birkhoffian differential system. In order to illustrate the advantages of this approach compared to known Lagrangian or Hamiltonian approaches we discuss a number of specific examples. In particular, the Birkhoffian approach includes networks which contain closed loops formed by capacitors, as well as inductor cutsets. We also extend our approach to the case of networks which contain independent voltage sources as well as independent current sources. Also, we derive a general balance law for an associated "energy function".Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures. Z. Angew. Math. Phys. (ZAMP), accepted for publicatio