For example, if i have a battery with 10V of power, and then i connect a wire to the battery it will have 10A of current in it.
If i connect 2 wires, why current doesn’t split between the two wires so that i have 5A in each one?
I have no knowledge in this area, the only logical conclusion i can come to with the little information i have is that both wires will have 10A of current because both will “work at full potential”, but then, the battery will run out of power at double the speed compared to having only 1 wire connected.
Is my guess correct or the solution is another one?
Thanks in advance.
In: 1
It does?
Kirchhoff’s Current Law: the sum of the currents coming into a node is equal to the sum of currents going out of a node. The current is literally just a count of the number of electrons passing through a node. You can’t have more electrons coming out of a node than go into it. The amount of current that goes through each branch coming out of a node is inversely related to the resistance of that path. Less of the current go down the path with higher resistance, which is why we say that “electricity follows the path of less resistance”.
However, there is another Kirchhoff’s law, Kirchhoff’ Voltage Law. This law states that the sum of the voltage drops in each loop in a circuit will be the same. Think of voltage like pressure in a water system. The battery is acting like a pump and pushes electrons into the circuit at a certain voltage/pressure which always gets use up regardless of which path the individual electrons follow to get back to the other terminal of the battery.
Notice however that I didn’t refer to either current or voltage as “power”. That is because neither current or voltage technically are power, both are a part of it. In electrical terms, power is the amount of work being done by the electrons passing through a node: P = I * V. You can send either a bunch of electrons through over a low voltage drop, or a few through at a high voltage drop. The work that they do is dependent on the pressure they are going through with the line with.
Now for practical purposes, the battery tells you how much voltage it can supply, but the amount of current in the system, and therefore the amount of power it can supply is defined by the resistances in the system: V = I * R. This is why P = I^2 * R is a commonly used formula for power because resistance is usually something that the circuit designer is limited by, primarily because the devices that she wants to power had internal resistances and she needs to make sure that device in questions gets enough to activate.
As for the amount of power a battery can supply, each battery has a fixed number of electrons it can supply as current. In order to figure out how many will flow out in a unit of time, you need to figure out the overall resistance of the circuit, which are well beyond a ELI5 and the common mathematically techniques to do so would be covered in a second year engineering course.
Latest Answers