I dont know what it actually is ‼️
In: Chemistry
The electricity is supposed to go from the battery to a light bulb, back to the battery.
Instead you’ve accidentally spilled water all over your setup, so the electricity goes from the battery… back to the battery. The circuit is physically shortened. This can cause a fire or other problems in an electrical circuit.
Well it sure isnt chemisty.
in electricity you can have a circut that does stuff. maybe there is a motor being powered, or a light is on.
whatever it is, it has some resistance and everything is fine.
Amps=volts/resiatance, and its amps that melt wires, so its nice when resistance is high.
but, if 2 wires get connected to bypass this longer circut making a “short circut” electricity will take that path, and the motor wont work. more importantly, the short circut probiably has almost 0 resistance, very low. which makes amps shoot MASSIVLY HIGH and its amps that melt wires and start fires soooooo something is going to break soon if the short isnt fixed
A short circuit is a path between the + and – connections from the power source – a battery, a voltage adapter, a power socket in the wall of your house – that doesn’t go through anything properly designed to use electricity, or at least there’s a bypass that lets electricity just go from the + to the – going around the intended appliance/device. Alternatively, one of the two connections could be a ground connection as long as the other is a non-zero voltage connection. They’re directly connected to each other by some well-conducting thing… a wire, a fork, a paperclip, a wrench… something that conducts electricity nicely.
Onto the math. Current (amps) = volts divided by the resistance of the load. Since there is almost no load with only wires being involved, resistance will be very low, maybe less than 1, and could result in 100 amps wanting to go through this wire. This is very bad in most situations.
Thankfully we have fuses and circuit breakers designed to shut off electricity when too many amps are flowing. For most outlets in your home, it’ll be 15 amps or so. Specific appliances needing more may have 30 to 40, like air conditioners, stoves, clothes dryers, and lately electric car chargers.
By definition, a short circuit is when you accidentally connect two parts of a circuit that are at different voltages. This causes current to flow from one to the other, in ways it shouldn’t. This causes problems and sometimes fires.
For example, if you have a battery, and you connect the positive side to the negative side with a wire, there is almost no resistance in that wire. So the electrical current can be very high, quickly draining the battery. In a house, where your power isn’t drained because it comes from the power line, this will cause the current to flow rapidly with almost no resistance, overheating the wires and whatever else is on that circuit. This is why your home has circuit breakers that trip if more current than expected gets pulled from your power lines.
In a circuit, electricity leaves a power source, goes through some things to do some sort of work, whether it’s operating a computer, turning a fan or generating light, and then returns to the power source. That’s why batteries have two ends and why electrical outlet always have at least two prongs.
A short circuit is when the electricity takes a shortcut — when it leaves the power source and finds a way back to the power source without having done any work. So, for example, if you take some scissors and cut a wire that’s plugged into the wall, the electricity will go down one of the conductors in the wire, hit the scissors and go back to the wall on the other conductor.
While electric current takes every path it can to go from an area of high potential to an area of low potential, most of the current goes down the path of least resistance.
In an ordinary circuit, many things provide resistance to limit current and prevent damage to the other objects in the circuit.
But if one were to create a path with very little resistance — known as a short circuit — from a high to a low potential source, a very large amount of current would flow that way, which could cause a fire in the wires or other circuit components not designed to handle the excess current.
If remember right, it’s one of the best movies from the 80s. Been a while though, mighta sucked.
Think of your water system. There’s a lot of water available, but the faucets restrict flow so that you only get as much water as you want. A short circuit would be like someone running over the fire hydrant in your front yard.
Think of a hypothetical water wheel fed by a pump in a continuing loop. Let’s say the pump can handle water coming in on its intake water wheel to pump) pipe at a max pressure of 10 PSI. It pumps water down the outflow (pump to wheel) pipe towards the water wheel at a pressure of 15 PSI, since it’s got to push that big water wheel. Once the water goes past the wheel, it’s been reduced in pressure to 8 PSI and so returns to the pump below the max pressure of 10 PSI.
Now imagine you dig a channel between the outflow and intake pipes so it bypasses the water wheel and water flows straight from the pump’s outflow to its intake. There no load (the water wheel) between the two paths, so the water hits the pump’s intake at the full pressure of 15 PSI and the pump itself bursts, spilling water everywhere.
Similarly an electric system is designed with a load in between the two poles of the system to use up some of the energy in the circuit. If you bypass that load, the full electrical energy of the circuit is being dumped into pathways that aren’t meant to handle it and they overheat and burn up. Or the electrical demand is too much for the power source to supply and it burns up.
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