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This tutorial is a brief introduction to the concepts of charge, voltage, and current. This
tutorial is not as long and tedious as a college textbook, yet it contains more information
than students are likely to find in an elementary schoolbook.
The Atom
Electric Charge
Electric Balance
Static Electricity
Let's say we steal an electron from one atom and give the electron to
another atom. One atom will have an overall positive charge and the other will have an
overall negative charge. When this happens, the two atoms are called ions. Because ions
have an overall electric charge, they can interact with other charged objects. Since like
charges repel and opposite charges attract, a positive ion will attract negatively charged
objects, such as electrons or other ions, and will repel positively charged objects. A
negatively charged ion will attract positively charged objects, and will repel other
negatively charged objects.
The same is true for larger objects. If you take electrons from one object and place them
on another object, the first object will have an overall positive charge while the second
will have an overall negative charge. Depending on the types of objects and the amount
of charge involved, the electric force may be enough to cause the objects to stick together.
This phenomenon is often referred to as "static electricity."
There are several ways to steal electrons from one object and give them to another. Some
of the ways include chemical reactions, mechanical motion, light, and even heat. If you
rub a glass rod with silk, the electrons in the glass rod will be knocked off and collected
on the silk. The glass rod gains an overall positive charge, and the silk gains an overall
negative charge. In a battery, chemical reactions are used to force electrons from the
positive terminal and place them on the negative terminal.
Measuring Charges
The amount of overall electric charge possessed by an object is measured in coulombs.
One coulomb is roughly equal to the amount of charge possessed by
6,000,000,000,000,000,000 (six billion billion) electrons. While this may seem like a
huge number at first, it is not really that much, since electrons are so tiny. Just to give you
an idea, one coulomb is roughly the amount of charge that flows through a 12-watt
automotive light bulb in one second.
If the amount of charge possessed by two objects and the distance between them are
known, it is possible to calculate the amount of force between the objects using a formula
known as Coulomb's law. This law was discovered by Charles Augustin de Coulomb in
1784, and states that the force between two charged objects varies directly as the charges
of the objects and inversely as the square of the distance between them. Coulomb's law
looks like this in formula form:
F is the force, in Newtons.
q and q' are the charges of the two objects, in coulombs.
r is the distance between the objects, in meters.
k is a constant equal to 8.98755×109 N m2 C-2
Voltage
Whenever electrons are taken from one object and placed on another object, causing an
imbalance of charge, we say that a voltage exists. That is what somebody means when
they say that something has so many volts of electricity. They are describing a difference
of charge in two different places. A standard AA battery has a difference of 1.5 volts
between its positive and negative terminal, while car battery has a difference of 12 volts
between its two terminals, and the everyday type of static electricity that causes things to
stick together and occasionally gives you a jolt when you touch a metal object is usually
measured in thousands of volts.
Volts are useful, because they neatly describe the size and strength of any electric field.
Visualizing the electric field between two simple plates is easy, but visualizing the field
in a complicated circuit with batteries, motors, light bulbs, and switches is very difficult.
Voltage simplifies circuits like these by describing the entire electric field with a single
number.
Electric Current
In the previous section, we looked at how current flows from one charged
object to another, canceling out the charges of the two objects. Once the charges were
canceled, the current stopped. If current were always this short-lived, it would be very
impractical. Imagine a flashlight that only lasted a fraction of a second before needing to
be recharged! While current does tend to cancel out charges on two objects and then stop
flowing, if a charge can be placed on the objects faster than the current can drain the
charge, it is possible to keep a current flowing continuously. That is what happens in a
battery. Chemical reactions within the battery pump electrons from the positive terminal
to the negative terminal faster than the device connected to the battery can drain them.
The battery will continue to supply as much current as the device requires until the
chemicals within the battery are used up, at which point the battery is dead and must be
replaced.
Resistance
All conductors offer some degree of resistance to the flow of electric current. What
happens is this: As electrons travel through the conductor, they bump into atoms, losing
some of their movement in jiggling the atom. The result is that the current flowing
through the conductor is slowed down, and the conductor is heated. The amount that a
given conductor resists the flow of electric current is measured in ohms.
Power
Whenever current flows, work is done. A conductor may be heated, a motor may be spun,
a bulb might give off light, or some other form of energy may be released. There is a
simple law that tells exactly how much work may be done by a flowing current. The
amount of work done is equal to the voltage of the supply times the current flowing
through the wire. This law is expressed in the form P=IV, where P is the power in watts, I
is the current in amps, and V is the voltage in volts. For example, if we find that a light
bulb draws half of an amp at 120 volts, we simply multiply the 120 volts by half an amp
to find that the bulb draws 60 watts of power.
Ohm's Law
Let's say you have a six volt battery and you need to draw two amps of
current. What resistance should you make the conductor? Or let's say you have a three
volt power supply and a thousand ohm resistor. How much current would flow through
the resistor if you were to connect the resistor to the power supply? In order to find the
answers to these questions, all you need to do is to use a simple mathematical formula
called ohm's law. Ohm's law states that the amount of current flowing through a
conductor times the resistance of the conductor is equal to voltage of the power supply.
This law is often expressed in the form V=IR, where V is the voltage measured in volts, I
is the current measured in amps, and R is the resistance measured in ohms.
Thanks!
Well, that's all that there is! I hope you enjoyed your tour through the world of voltage,
current, and resistance. Please, tell me what you think. Just send an e-mail to me with
your comments. Have a nice day!
- SwansonTec