So I’m a beginner in electronics. I’m trying to teach myself because I never had a teacher to explain anything. One of my things is that it’s hard for me to understand something without fully understanding the fundamental basics, which has kept me from progressing in my self-study.
I can’t understand why electrical current shares its power across its loads in a circuit (series, obvs).
For example, a 12 volt battery is connected to a lamp. That lamp gets 12 volts of electricity running through its filaments (or LEDs or whatever). If there were 2 identical lamps in series, then that 12 volts would be split up between each lamp, which would result in them each getting only 6 volts.
But why? The electrons don’t know what the whole circuit looks like, they don’t know or care about how many loads there are. When the actual electron flow hits upon the first load in the circuit, why shouldn’t they act the same as if there is one load? Why would they behave as if there were more loads? At that time, when the electrons are meeting that first load, what makes them go, “only going to be half as bright, buddy”?
My dad tried to help by showing the equation of amps and volts and current, but that doesn’t answer my question at all. It only says it does do that, but it doesn’t tell me WHY.
In: Technology
You should remember that current is just moving electrons and there is a general principle in electronics that you can’t just “lose electrons,” this being the intuition behind Kirchoff’s Current Law.
So resistance is something that resists current going through it. You can kind of think of it as a bit of a traffic jam happening as a result of this, you have the electrons going through the second load slow down/have less being able to push through, which stops all the electrons before it from being able to push through because they have to wait until the electrons before it move.
That way this traffic jam eventually reaches the first load.
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