BASIC ELECTRICITY - III

In the first chapter of Basic Electricity you learned that current is basically the flow of electrons in a wire. And the term 'AMPS or AMPERES' refers to how many electrons are flowing past a certain point per second.

In this chapter in prior to knowing what VOLTAGE is, you will know what voltage does.There's an important difference.

VOLTAGE

As per the records; Voltage is a difference in electrical potential energy, per unit charge, between two points. This is a boring definition which you might fall into and end up in mugging it up, but wait., you need not do that...

Okay, the super simplified explanation of voltage is that volts push current around an electric circuit. Voltage behaves like a pushing force, forcing electrons to start moving around, which creates an electric current. You can also register the below picture as a comical explanation of Voltage.

Quite absurd(state of being ridiculous) right....?

Okay, now let's see an example for better understanding in the picture below you see an electric motor with some wires connected to it, and that fancy box is an adjustable power supply., i.e: that voltage box allows me to create nearly any voltage i want, which is useful for designing circuits, but you don't need one of these to start learning about electricity- you can just use Batteries. 

Example

And the example goes like this....

Voltage Indication

The voltage I'm generating will be shown here, and the fun thing about this power supply is that it can automatically measure how much current is flowing and that's going to be shown here....

Current Indication

I want you to see how when you increase the voltage going to the motor, more current flows. If we start out with the power supply set to Zero volts, the motor doesn't do anything. Set the power supply to produce 1 volt. 

Immediately you can see that there is current flowing - roughly 1.8 amps. And when there is current flowing, energy can flow from the power supply to the motor. Now let's increase the voltage to 2 volts. Now that we have a bigger pushing force, more current is flowing, 2 amps. So more energy is flowing through the motor, so obviously it's going to turn faster. And even more if the voltage is cranked up , we can get even more current and the motor speeds up even faster.

Okay, that's just one example of what voltage does. You can use a voltage source to power motors, light bulbs, electronics and other things.

Another important fact that a voltage can do is, it can carry useful information. You can use different voltages as electrical signals that represent data. Now wait....! I think this is way more advanced than what i want to tell you about in this chapter, I just want you to understand that sometimes Voltage is used to power things that draw high amounts of current, but you can also use voltage as a signal, and almost no current flows at all. You just create the changing voltages with a transmitter and detect the changing voltages with a suitable receiver.

Now remember, here the whole volts pushing amps thing is just a helpful simplification. What's really going on here is that there's a chemical reaction inside this battery that's creating a voltage.

We'll see that in the next part of the chapter. Kindly wait for the next chapter.

BASIC ELECTRICITY - II

As said earlier the second part of the latter one is the most common and general confusion that an electrical and electronics engineer might get into. That is 'Conventional Current and Actual current flow'

CONVENTIONAL CURRENT vs ACTUAL ELECTRON FLOW

In this simple electrical circuit you may imagine that the current flows from positive to negative., that is from the positive terminal of the battery to the negative terminal of the battery.

All the engineers propose this to be the conventional current which is commonly used all over the field but the thing is 'CONVENTIONAL CURRENT FLOW IS WRONG'.

Back in the early days when the scientists were trying to figure out whether it was the protons or the electrons that were flowing through a circuit.

Unfortunately every formula and derivation we use in electronics is based around the mistake of assuming that the current flows from positive to negative. And the good news is that the formulas are consistent and whenever we do any math we use the system of Conventional current and it works. So you can just PRETEND that electrons are moving from positive to negative even though that is backwards to reality.

Alright, Amperes are easier to understand, its just the flow of electrons. I Hope its clear about the myths about the direction of flow of electrons.And the difference between Conventional current flow direction and the Actual current flow direction.

In the part it will be 'Voltage'. 

Hope the post is useful and easier to understand in a literal way.Do let me know in the comments section.Thank You.

BASIC ELECTRICITY

In this series of Basic Electricity, we will have a look on

~AMPS

~VOLTS

~OHMS

~WATTS

At first, we'll know about AMPS or AMPERE; 

"AMPERE" or "AMPS"

We know that everything in the universe is made up tiny particles known as atoms. A simplified model of an atom looks something like this; 

It consists of the positively charged center called as the 'NUCLEUS', and have negatively charged electrons orbiting around it.

The terms positively charged and negatively charged are arbitrary and the most important thing to know is that Opposite charges attract each other and similar charges move away from each other. So the positive nucleus of the atom attracts negative electrons and if electrons get close to each other they'll push each other away.

In most solid materials just sit there inside the material and not move around as the are tightly packed in a solid. But in metals like copper, the electrons have the ability to move around. The positive nuclei stay in the same place preserving the structure of the metal. But the electrons can Drift(move) around from atom to atom. Since the negatively charged electrons repel each other when you move one electron from atom to atom, you will also move the other(adjacent) electron from atom to atom. 

Let's say we have a wire which is one atom thick as shown above, you know this is simplifying things to the maximum level by showing one electron per atom. Then let's say we force the first electron in line to jump to the second atom in line, the electrons will all push each other around at the same time.

In order to understand it in a literal way the movement of electrons which are free in an atom are pictorially represented below.

Even though each electron is only jumping a tiny distance, this overall flow happens close to the 'SPEED OF LIGHT'.! And that's what basically the flow of electricity is. When electrons are flowing through something we can say that electric current is flowing. Now how do we measure electric current...???

You would've probably heard of the term 'amp' which is a short form of 'Ampere'. An Ampere refers to the amount of electrons flowing per second through anything that conducts electricity. The equivalent value of 1 ampere is given by;

These numbers are not necessary to memorize but we must understand that the electrical current refers to the amount of electron flow and that one ampere means a lot of electrons are flowing and obviously two amperes means twice the electrons are flowing. For further more easy understanding the analogy of water flowing through a pipe can be compared to the electron flow through a wire.

Now in having understood the terms 'AMPERE', 'ELECTRON FLOW' and 'CURRENT' now we can further proceed on discussing Electrical Circuits.

ELECTRIC CIRCUIT is a closed loop through which current could flow around. The electron flow in an electric circuit can be well understood by understanding the simple circuit given below

 In this example of a light bulb, electrons can flow out from the battery through the copper wire through the light bulb through another piece of wire and to the other side or terminal of the battery. Always remember when the current flows through any loop the electrons(all of them) are moving at the same time. And over here the negative terminal of the battery pushes the negative electrons away and those electrons are pushing other(adjacent) electrons away. This keeps happening throughout the circuit allowing energy to be transferred from the battery to the light. But, if u get to cut one of the wire or anywhere on the wire;

As shown in the figure you would no longer have a complete circuit, as we should know that electrons cannot jump through the air from wire to wire, this comes to an inference that if electrons cannot flow through a concurrent(existing or  happening) loop, then no current is flowing through the loop or the circuit. And when there is no current flowing through the circuit there can be no transfer of energy through the circuit and thus the light stays off. This is how the 'ELECTRIC SWITCHES' work.

The above shown is a simple literal representation of an electric switch. A switch has two pieces of metal inside it and when the pieces of metal touch we get a complete circuit and the light turns on, when pieces of metal are pulled apart it becomes an open circuit and the light is turned off as no current flows through the circuit.This is also the same how  the fuses work.

In the second part of this chapter we will study and get to know the differences between 'Conventional current' and the 'actual electron flow'.

Hey there guys.
I'm Ajay Sekar and I feel greatly intensified to write my first blog ever. Here you can find the literal and simplistic dictionary or references that an Electrical or an Electronics engineer need on components. One component a day makes an engineer's day...! sounds catchy right?
That's how it's gonna go down one component daily is the motive.
I hope it will surely help each of you guys out there. Hoping for the best. I request you all to kindly share and support and of course please do flash in your comments. Thank you.
Hoping for the best. May God bless us all.