I imagine them as fast cars on a highway, when the cable is straight that’s not a problem, but when the cable has bends and stuff?
In: Physics
Electrons flowing through a wire are normally really small. Just a few millimeters per second on average.
Also they don’t move on straight pathes (even in a straight piece of wire). They basically constantly bump into atoms, which force them slow down and change directions.
So you dont really have a highway with many cars next to each other, but roads where cars constantly drive over speed bumpers and every time they do so they switch lanes.
The electrons are pretty slow (and change directions anyway on collisions), so that centrifugal forces are not really relevant in normal situations.
You can get some interesting issues with sharp edges at high voltages (like that you get sparks from them), but that is not caused by a flow of electrons (an electrical current), but only by an electric field which gets high enough so that it can go through normally insulating materials like air.
The idea of electrons flowing as a current through the wire like water in a river or cars on a highway might be helpful conceptually, but isn’t physically what’s happening in the wire. Like others have said it’s more chaotic interactions between electrons, and not a single electron going down the highway.
The scales that those interactions are happening on as well are so small that any curve that we can observe would be a “straight line” in the context of the electrons.
Think less of a car turning around a corner and more a car slamming into the guardrail and bouncing around the corner because it can’t turn.
Others have correctly noted that the electrons in wires are quite slow and thus there is no notable centrifugal force. But it still is there and it gets visible when you make them faster.
How to make them faster? Remove that wire which slows them down! Take an electron beam such as in a CRT monitor and apply a magnet to force it onto a bent or spiral-y path. That’s, from the outside, a centripetal force; which from the perspective of the electron is a centrifugal force.
If you still want a noticeable centrifugal force inside a (semi)conductor: that’s what a Hall sensor does. It essentially combines those two settings into a sensor for magnetism.
Electricity “flowing” through a wire is sort of like Like hitting a row of blocks from one end… the block on your end didnt move much, but the signal of your hit instantly arrived at the block on the far end.
No, they are actually slow (the pulses of them bumping each other in sequence travels fast, not the electrons themselves). They do experience Lorentz force though, which arises when electrical charge moves inside of a magnetic field. This force wants to make electrons turn sideways from a straight path, trying to make them circle around perpendicular to the magnetic field.
The magnetic field of wires causing Lorentz force stress on other wires inside microchips is one of the ways they can really slowly wear out (note: we are talking about a decades/centuries timeframe).
Unless I am mistaken, feeling centrifugal forces should be in the domain of gravity (i.e. relativity). But those effects haven’t been so far explained when it comes to quantum particles, i.e. quantum theory and gravity are still not joined. So, perhaps, there is no good answer to your question. But if there is such an effect, it is beyond what is currently observable, I should say.
I might be completely wrong here.
Latest Answers