What are the 5 factors that affect current flow?

Asked by: Jerome Yeboah

What are the factors affecting the flow of current?

• Potential Difference between ends (Voltage)
• Temperature.
• Material of wire.
• Length of wire.
• Area of Cross- section.

What are the 5 factors that affect the surface currents?

The ocean has an interconnected current, or circulation, system powered by wind, tides, Earth’s rotation (Coriolis effect), the sun (solar energy), and water density differences. The topography and shape of ocean basins and nearby landmasses also influence ocean currents.

What are three factors that affect current flow?

Surface currents are controlled by three factors: global winds, the Coriolis effect, and continental deflections.

What are the 3 factors of current electricity?

To produce an electric current, three things are needed: a supply of electric charges (electrons) which are free to flow, some form of push to move the charges through the circuit and a pathway to carry the charges.

What 2 factors determine current flow?

1 Answer. IN a simple circuit supply voltage and Resistance determines the current.

What are the 5 causes of ocean currents?

Causes of Ocean Currents

• Solar heating. it causes water to expand.
• Wind. The Wind is responsible for ocean currents as it blows the water on the surface, causing the currents.
• Gravity. Gravity tends to pull items towards the surface of the earth.
• The salinity of the water.
• Temperature.
• Coriolis effect.
• Underwater earthquakes.

What are the 5 major ocean currents?

There are five major gyres: the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the North Pacific, the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean Gyre, see figure 1. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is situated in the Southern Ocean and constantly circles around Antarctica because there are no land masses to interrupt the currents.

What can affect current flow?

What factors affect the size of an electric current?

• Potential Difference between ends (Voltage)
• Temperature.
• Material of wire.
• Length of wire.
• Area of Cross- section.

What effects the flow of a current?

The main effects are heating, chemical and magnetic effects. When current flows in a circuit it exhibits various effects. The main effects are heating, chemical and magnetic effects.

What affects electricity flow?

Resistance opposes current and therefore the higher the resistance, the smaller the current. Therefore the factors that affect the resistance are the same factors that control the flow of current through a wire.

What are the 4 factors that affect resistance?

There are 4 different factors which affect resistance:

• The type of material of which the resistor is made.
• The length of the resistor.
• The thickness of the resistor.
• The temperature of the conductor.

On what factors current depends?

The strength of the electric current depends on the following factors they are, Conductor resistance and its cross-section. Conductor thickness and the material used to make conductor. The potential difference across the two points of the conductor. Electrons drift velocity and its number density.

What is flow of current?

Electric Current is the flow of electrons through a wire or solution. In a solid the electrons are passed from one positively charged metallic atom to next but in solution the electron is carried by the ions present in the solution. A solution capable of carrying charge is called an electrolyte.

What causes current electricity?

Electricity is created when an outside force causes electrons to move from atom to atom. The flow of electrons is called an “electrical current.”

How does current flow in a wire?

The direction of an electric current is by convention the direction in which a positive charge would move. Thus, the current in the external circuit is directed away from the positive terminal and toward the negative terminal of the battery. Electrons would actually move through the wires in the opposite direction.

Factors affecting conduction

The conduction of electric current is affected by several parameters, which must be taken into account when designing or working with electrical circuits. It depends fundamentally on three factors: the type or nature of the material through which the current passes, the length and thickness of the conductor, and the temperature.

Type of material

Not all materials are equally opposed to the passage of current; each material offers greater or lesser resistance to the flow of electrons through it. Good conductors, such as silver, copper or aluminum, offer very little resistance. Others, such as lead, conduct current but offer more resistance than better conductors, such as copper.

Poor conductors (insulators) such as glass, wood or paper offer very high resistance to the passage of current. In an electrical circuit, the smaller the diameter of a conductor, the greater its resistance (R) and the lower the current flow or intensity (I). The larger the diameter of the conductor, the lower the resistance and the higher the current.

Conductor length

The flow of electrons is also conditioned by the length of the conductor; for two wires of the same material, the longer one will offer more resistance to conduction. We can assimilate this effect to what happens in a water pipe: the longer the pipe, the more resistance it will offer to the passage of water, forcing an increase in the power of the pump that drives it.

The same happens with the cables that reach our house from a power plant, which must travel many kilometers, so they have to be built with materials that offer the least possible resistance. In this case, other methods are also used to minimize resistance as much as possible, such as increasing the diameter of the conductor, or playing with the voltage and current values at the power plant and at its arrival at the subscriber’s point.

When we study Ohm’s law later, we will see the reason why large power distribution lines, which can run for hundreds of kilometers, are of high voltage. This is a technical trick to reduce as much as possible the problem of electrical resistance and the level of current flow over such distances.

Without going now into the details of the application of Ohm’s law, we will say that for the same power supplied, raising the voltage to a given value can reduce the current in the same proportion, i.e., the power delivered will be the same. This allows us to send through a high voltage line a lower current intensity, and therefore the cable can be much thinner. The higher the voltage present in the cable, the less current we need to send through it to achieve the same power on arrival at the destination point. Then, on arrival, it is only necessary to reduce the voltage by means of transformers and the current will rise again in the same proportion to maintain the original power. Without this method, power distribution cables would have to be extremely thick, not only to carry an immense amount of current through them, but also to compensate for the resistance due to the length of the cable.

Conductor thickness

The thickness or cross section of the conductor is another important factor affecting conduction. The thicker it is, the lower the resistance and therefore the greater the flow of electrons.
Following the example of the water pipe, water will flow more easily through a wide pipe than a narrow one, allowing more water volume.

It is easy to explain what happens inside the conductor: when we apply an electromotive force, the free electrons available in the material try to get from the negative to the positive charge, and to do so they jump from one atom to another in the space available to them.

If we were to increase the thickness of the conductor to double, we would now have twice as many electrons to achieve the same current, which means less effort to get from the negative to the positive charge; since the path to travel is now twice as wide, the resistance has been halved.

Temperature

Temperature, although to a lesser extent, is another factor affecting conduction. In most materials the resistance increases as they heat up; the colder the material, the less resistance it offers to the passage of electric current. This fact is determined because in the atoms of a material, when heated, the electrons of the outer layer change their facility to become free electrons; the higher the temperature, the more they are bound to the atom, making it more difficult to make them jump out of their orbits.

But not all materials follow this rule. A few, such as carbon, or electrolytic solutions, suffer the opposite effect: they decrease their resistance as temperature increases, which means an increase in current if used as a conductive medium.
However, the results of temperature conduction in materials that are good conductors, such as copper and aluminum, are of lesser significance. Thus, of the four factors that involve some opposition to the flow of electrons (type of material, length and cross-section of the conductor), temperature is the least important factor.