Electricity Tutorial

Electricity Tutorial

This tutorial is a brief introduction to the concepts of charge, voltage, and current. This tutorial is not as long and tedious as a college textbook, yet it contains more information than students are likely to find in an elementary schoolbook.

The Atom

Before we can understand electricity we have to know some things about atoms. On the left is a conceptual drawing of an atom. Atoms are the building blocks of matter. Everything is made of atoms, from rocks, to trees, to stars, to even yourself. At the core of all atoms is a tightly packed nucleus containing one or more protons (colored red in the picture), and usually an equal number of neutrons (gray). Electrons (blue) surround the nucleus, forming an electron cloud. The number of electrons in an electrically stable atom is always equal to the number of protons in the nucleus.

Basic Electricity - Protons, Neutrons and Electrons

Protons have a positive charge and neutrons have no charge at all. Electrons have a negative charge and are very small compared to protons and neutrons. The nucleus is very heavy compared to its electrons. As an example we'll look at the simplest of all atoms the hydrogen atom. The hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron. A hydrogen proton has a mass of approximately 1850 times the mass its an electron. Elements are classified by the number of protons they have. This is the atomic number. This is what differentiates the basic elements. For example, If an atom has one proton then its a hydrogen atom, if an atom has two protons then its a helium atom and an atom with three protons would be lithium. Copper has twenty nine protons. The atomic weight is the total number of protons and neutrons an atom contains.

Normally an atom has the same number of electrons as it has protons. When the number of electrons equals the number of protons the atom's total electrical charge is balanced or neutralized. If the atom loses an electron it has more protons than electrons and therefore its total charge is positive. If the atom gains an extra electron it contains more electrons than protons and has an overall negative electrical charge. When an atom has an imbalance of electrons and protons it is said to be ionized. An atom with a positive charge is a called a positive ion. An atom with a negative charge is called negative ion. A positive ion will exhibit an electron attraction while a negative ion will try to lose its extra electron.

Electric Charge

A strange thing happens between protons and electrons: a proton and an electron are always attracted to one another, while a proton will repel other protons, and an electron will repel other electrons. This behavior is caused by something called the electric force. Protons are said to have a positive electric charge, while electrons have a negative electric charge.
Two objects with the same type of charge push away from each other, while two objects with opposite charges attract to each other. Since a proton and an electron have opposite electric charges, they are attracted to each other. Two protons, however, move away from each other because of their equal electric charges. The same is true of two electrons, which push away from each other because of their equal negative charges.

Electric Balance

Most matter contains an equal number of protons and electrons. The negative electrons balance out the positive protons, and the matter has no overall electrical charge. The word overall is important, since the charges are still there, bouncing around inside the matter. Electrical charges are everywhere, but we just can't sense them because they are in balance. In fact, if you take chemistry, you'll learn that the electric force is the very thing that holds matter together. The next time you pick something up, just think that whatever you are holding is literally filled with electric charge. This is an important fact that many people miss when they study electricity.

Static Electricity

Let's say we steal an electron from one atom and give the electron to another atom. One atom will have an overall positive charge and the other will have an overall negative charge. When this happens, the two atoms are called ions. Because ions have an overall electric charge, they can interact with other charged objects. Since like charges repel and opposite charges attract, a positive ion will attract negatively charged objects, such as electrons or other ions, and will repel positively charged objects. A negatively charged ion will attract positively charged objects, and will repel other negatively charged objects.
The same is true for larger objects. If you take electrons from one object and place them on another object, the first object will have an overall positive charge while the second will have an overall negative charge. Depending on the types of objects and the amount of charge involved, the electric force may be enough to cause the objects to stick together. This phenomenon is often referred to as "static electricity."
There are several ways to steal electrons from one object and give them to another. Some of the ways include chemical reactions, mechanical motion, light, and even heat. If you rub a glass rod with silk, the electrons in the glass rod will be knocked off and collected on the silk. The glass rod gains an overall positive charge, and the silk gains an overall negative charge. In a battery, chemical reactions are used to force electrons from the positive terminal and place them on the negative terminal.

Measuring Charges

The amount of overall electric charge possessed by an object is measured in coulombs. One coulomb is roughly equal to the amount of charge possessed by 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 (six billion billion) electrons. While this may seem like a huge number at first, it is not really that much, since electrons are so tiny. Just to give you an idea, one coulomb is roughly the amount of charge that flows through a 12-watt automotive light bulb in one second.

If the amount of charge possessed by two objects and the distance between them are known, it is possible to calculate the amount of force between the objects using a formula known as Coulomb's law. This law was discovered by Charles Augustin de Coulomb in 1784, and states that the force between two charged objects varies directly as the charges of the objects and inversely as the square of the distance between them. Coulomb's law looks like this in formula form:

F is the force, in Newtons.
q and q' are the charges of the two objects, in coulombs.
r is the distance between the objects, in meters.
k is a constant equal to 8.98755×10⁹ N m² C^-2

Voltage

Whenever electrons are taken from one object and placed on another object, causing an imbalance of charge, we say that a voltage exists. That is what somebody means when they say that something has so many volts of electricity. They are describing a difference of charge in two different places. A standard AA battery has a difference of 1.5 volts between its positive and negative terminal, while car battery has a difference of 12 volts between its two terminals, and the everyday type of static electricity that causes things to stick together and occasionally gives you a jolt when you touch a metal object is usually measured in thousands of volts.

Another way to understand voltage is to think of an "electric field." Imagine a positively charged plate next to a negatively charged plate. If you place a positively charged object between these plates, the plates’ electric field will attract the object to the negative side. Imagine that you place an object with 1 Coulomb of positive charge next to the negative plate, and then pull the object towards the positive plate. Because the electric field creates a force in the opposite direction, moving the charged object requires energy. The amount of energy depends on the distance between the plates and the strength of the electric field created by the plates. This energy is called the electric field’s "voltage." One volt is the amount of energy in joules required to move an object with 1 coulomb of charge through an electric field. Mathematically, 1 Volt = 1 Joule / 1 Coulomb.
Volts are useful, because they neatly describe the size and strength of any electric field. Visualizing the electric field between two simple plates is easy, but visualizing the field in a complicated circuit with batteries, motors, light bulbs, and switches is very difficult. Voltage simplifies circuits like these by describing the entire electric field with a single number.

Electric Current

The word current comes from the Latin word currere, which means to run or to flow. An electric current is nothing more than the flow of electric charges. Electric charges can only flow through certain materials, called conductors. Although the electrons in most materials are confined to fixed orbits, some materials, including most metals, have many loose electrons which are free to wander around through the material. Materials with this property act as conductors.
When a conductor is placed between two charged objects, these loose electrons are pushed away by the negatively charged object and are sucked into the positively charged object. In other words, when a difference of potential is applied across a conductor the surplus electrons from the negative source dump electrons into the atoms of the conductor displacing their original atoms which migrate to the next atom and the process is repeated over and over creating a domino effect though the conductor.
The result is that there is a flow of charge, called a current, and the two object's charges become balanced. This organized flow of electrons is called electric current. Current is measured in how many electrons flow past a given point in one second. The unit of measure is a coulomb per second and is expressed in amps or I. One coulomb is equal to 6.28e18 or 6,280,000,000,000,000,000 electrons. So, one amp is equal to 6,280,000,000,000,000,000 electrons per second. When you read that something uses so many amps, what you are being told is the amount of current flowing through the device. One ampere is equal to the flow of one coulomb of charge in one second.

Batteries and Current

In the previous section, we looked at how current flows from one charged object to another, canceling out the charges of the two objects. Once the charges were canceled, the current stopped. If current were always this short-lived, it would be very impractical. Imagine a flashlight that only lasted a fraction of a second before needing to be recharged! While current does tend to cancel out charges on two objects and then stop flowing, if a charge can be placed on the objects faster than the current can drain the charge, it is possible to keep a current flowing continuously. That is what happens in a battery. Chemical reactions within the battery pump electrons from the positive terminal to the negative terminal faster than the device connected to the battery can drain them. The battery will continue to supply as much current as the device requires until the chemicals within the battery are used up, at which point the battery is dead and must be replaced.

Resistance

All conductors offer some degree of resistance to the flow of electric current. What happens is this: As electrons travel through the conductor, they bump into atoms, losing some of their movement in jiggling the atom. The result is that the current flowing through the conductor is slowed down, and the conductor is heated. The amount that a given conductor resists the flow of electric current is measured in ohms.

Power

Whenever current flows, work is done. A conductor may be heated, a motor may be spun, a bulb might give off light, or some other form of energy may be released. There is a simple law that tells exactly how much work may be done by a flowing current. The amount of work done is equal to the voltage of the supply times the current flowing through the wire. This law is expressed in the form P=IV, where P is the power in watts, I is the current in amps, and V is the voltage in volts. For example, if we find that a light bulb draws half of an amp at 120 volts, we simply multiply the 120 volts by half an amp to find that the bulb draws 60 watts of power.

Ohm's Law

Let's say you have a six volt battery and you need to draw two amps of current. What resistance should you make the conductor? Or let's say you have a three volt power supply and a thousand ohm resistor. How much current would flow through the resistor if you were to connect the resistor to the power supply? In order to find the answers to these questions, all you need to do is to use a simple mathematical formula called ohm's law. Ohm's law states that the amount of current flowing through a conductor times the resistance of the conductor is equal to voltage of the power supply. This law is often expressed in the form V=IR, where V is the voltage measured in volts, I is the current measured in amps, and R is the resistance measured in ohms.