What is a lumped electric network?

What is a lumped electric network?

A lumped network is usually a simplification of a distributed network, such as a transmission line.

A transmission line has built in resistance, inductance and capacitance, for every tiny fraction of it’s length. It would take a lot of calculus to do any calculations on this.

Instead, the line is simplified to lump the values for every meter (for example) as resistance per meter, inductance per meter and capacitance per meter, and to realize the circuit with those lumped components. This makes calculations much easier, and it is quite accurate.