Kirchoff's Law Lab Report 6t1314

TITLE: Experiment 105, KIRCHHOFF’S LAWS AIMS: The aim of the experiment is to understand the principles behind Kirchhoff’s laws The experiment has been set up to Kirchhoff’s current law and Kirchhoff’s voltage law THEORY: A network is usually complicated system of electrical conductors and composed of different elements in it. KIRCHHOFF continued Ohm’s law to networks composed of loops and nodes. He gave 2 laws that enabled the simplification of the network to calculate current in any part. Part A: Current law The first law states that the total current flowing into the junction is equal to the total current flowing out of it. I1 I1 = I 2 + I 3 I2 I3 The law follows from the fact that electric charges do not accumulate at the points of a network and if the current flows towards a chosen point it is positive and if it is flowing in the opposite direction it is said to be negative. Part B: Voltage law It states that the algebraic sum of potential drops in each conductor in any closed mesh in a network in addition to the sum of all the electromotive forces in that mesh is zero. ΣIR + Σe.m.f = 0 It follows from the fact that if we start at a particular point and goes round the mesh and back to that same point the we should be at the same potential which was at the beginning. Therefore this means that all the sources in that mesh must be equal to the potential drops provided all the signs have been correctly input.