In Measurements you can measure RMS Power. It think the proper measure of power is AVG Power.
Is there any case where someone would want RMS Power ? I’m not sure if it has any practical meaning, or what it would mean.
You can do e.g. AVG P(R1) to get the average power in Resistor R1 (of course only if R1 exists in your schematic).
This is not the case for power. Average power will give the correct net number of joules transferred per unit time. To be meaningful, it is really the cycle average assuming a periodic waveform. In the end, joules do the work and are what matter.
RMS voltage or current can be used to compute the correct average power dissipated in a fixed linear resistor. Again, this is most meaningful if you are talking about periodic waveforms.
If the load is nonlinear, reactive, or both, you need to compute compute everything on a harmonic basis.
A caveat: companies selling audio equipment often talk about RMS amplifier power, but the audio product world is infamous for bogus mumbo jumbo, despite the efforts of some truly fine audio engineers and designers, who have to design for highly reactive and complex loads and complex signals.
John
Thanks for confirming that RMS power is not useful. Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something.
Simulating this simple circuit is convincing since we know the resistor must dissipate 1 watt.
All of the meas options provide a useful result except for RMS P(R1).
If you run the simulation for 1 second and a whole number of cycles, the INTEG meas gives 1000 milli-joules, one joule, 1 watt-sec.
The KiCAD measurement interface is a convenience vs typing .meas directives.
