1

Chapter 6

Electric circuits

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 2
Chapter Overview


Electric current and current density


Resistance, Resistivity and Ohm’s law


Circuits

Single-loop

Multi-loop

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 3
Electric current

(a) Any isolated conducting loop—regardless of whether it has an excess charge — is all at the same potential. No electric field
can exist within it or along its surface.

(b) The conducting loop is no longer at a single potential. Electric fields act inside the material making up the loop, exerting forces
on internal charges, causing them to move and thus establishing a current.

Steady state condition the current is the same at aa’, bb’, cc’.

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 4
Current density
• Current i (a scalar quantity) is related to current density J
(a vector quantity) by

where dA is a vector perpendicular to a surface element of area dA .

• The current density J has the same direction as the velocity of the moving charges if they are positive charges and the
opposite direction if the moving charges are negative.

• Streamlines representing current density in the flow of charge through a constricted conductor.

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 5
Current density
Drift speed:𝑣 −
𝑑 = drift speed = speed of e in a conductor

Conduction electrons are actually moving to the right but the

conventional current i is said to move to the left.

• By convention, the direction of the current density J and the sense of the current arrow are drawn in that same direction,
as is the drift speed vd. The drift velocity vd is related to the current density by

Here the product ne, whose SI unit is the coulomb per cubic meter (C/m3), is the carrier charge density.
• electron drift speeds are perhaps 10-4 and 10-5 m/s whereas the random-motion speeds are around 10 6 m/s.

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 6
Resistance and Resistivity
Instead of the resistance R of an object, we may deal with the resistivity ρ of the material:

The reciprocal of resistivity is conductivity σ of the material:

The resistance R of a conducting wire of length L and uniform cross section is

A is the cross-sectional area.

Dr. Mohammad Haidar
 7
Resistance and Resistivity
Variation of the resistivity with temperature:

The resistivity of copper as a function of temperature.

For many materials, including metals, the relation between ρ and temperature T is approximated by the equation

Here T0 is a reference temperature, ρ0 is the resistivity at T0, and α is the temperature coefficient of resistivity for the material.

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 8
Ohm’s Law

A potential difference V is applied across the device being tested, and the resulting current i through the device is measured as
V is varied in both magnitude and polarity.

• In (a), R = V/i of the device is independent of the magnitude and polarity of V.

• In (b), the relation between i and V is not linear; it depends on the value of the applied potential difference V.

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 9
Ohm’s Law
A Microscopic View
The assumption that the conduction electrons in a metal are free to move like the
molecules in a gas leads to an expression for the resistivity of a metal:

Here n is the number of free electrons per unit volume and τ is the mean time
between the collisions of an electron with the atoms of the metal.

Metals obey Ohm’s law because the mean free time τ is approximately
independent of the magnitude E of any electric field applied to a metal.

An electron moving from A to B, making

six collisions en route (gray line) and in the
presence of an applied electric field E
(green line).

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 10
Power

The power P, or rate of energy transfer, in an electrical device

across which a potential difference V is maintained is

If the device is a resistor, the power can also be written as

or,

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 11
Single-loop circuits
To produce a steady flow of charge, you need a “charge pump,” a device that—by doing work on the charge carriers—
maintains a potential difference between a pair of terminals. We call such a device an emf device, and the device is said to
provide an emf, which means that it does work on charge carriers.

• The emf device keeps one of its terminals (called the positive terminal and often labeled
+) at a higher electric potential than the other terminal (called the negative terminal
and labeled -).

• We can represent the emf of the device with an arrow that points from the negative
terminal toward the positive terminal as in Figure.

• An emf device does work on charges to maintain a potential difference between its
output terminals. If dW is the work the device does to force positive charge dq from the
negative to the positive terminal, then the emf (work per unit charge) of the device is

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 12
Single-loop circuits

The device transfers energy to the charge carriers passing through it. This energy can then be transferred from the charge
carriers to other devices in the circuit.
The actual direction of the current in the circuit is determined by the battery with the larger emf (B in this example).

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 13
Single-loop circuits
Calculating Current in a Single-Loop Circuits?
1- Energy Method

During the same interval, a charge dq = i dt will have moved through battery B,
and the work that the battery will have done on this charge is:

From the principle of conservation of energy, the work done by the (ideal)
battery must equal the thermal energy that appears in the resistor:

energy per unit charge transferred to

energy per unit charge transferred the moving charges by the battery.
from the moving charges to thermal
energy within the resistor.

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 14
Single-loop circuits
Calculating Current in a Single-Loop Circuits?
2- Potential Method
Let us start at point a, whose potential is Va, and mentally walk clockwise around the circuit
until we are back at point a, keeping track of potential changes as we move.

Because the battery is ideal, the potential difference between its terminals is equal to .

When we pass through the battery to the high-potential terminal, the change in potential is +

After making a complete loop, start at point a and return back to a:

The value of Va cancels from this equation, which becomes

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 15
Single-loop circuits
Potential difference across R and battery

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 16
Single-loop circuits
Internal resistance
A real battery, with internal resistance r, wired to an external resistor of resistance R. The internal resistance of the battery is the
electrical resistance of the conducting materials of the battery and thus is an un removable feature of the battery.

if we apply the loop rule clockwise beginning at point a, the changes in potential give us

Solving for the current we find,

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 17
Single-loop circuits
Resistance in series
three resistances connected in series to an ideal battery with emf .

The potential differences that then exist across the resistances in the series produce identical
currents i in them. To find total resistance Req, we apply the loop rule to both circuits. starting
at a and going clockwise around the circuit, we find

or

The three resistances replaced with a single equivalent resistance Req, we find

or

Equating them, we get,

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 18
Multi-loop circuits
The junction rule:

• From Conservation of Charge:

I1 = I2 + I3

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 19
Multi-loop circuits
Figure shows a circuit containing more than one loop.

• If we traverse the left-hand loop in a counterclockwise direction

from point b, the loop rule gives us

• If we traverse the right-hand loop in a counterclockwise direction from point b, the loop
rule gives us

• If we had applied the loop rule to the big loop, we would have obtained (moving
counterclockwise from b) the equation

which is the sum of two small loops equations.

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 20
Multi-loop circuits
Resistances in Parallel

The current in each actual resistance in Fig. (a) as

where V is the potential difference between a and b. If we apply the junction rule at point a in Fig. (a) and then substitute
these values, we find

In Fig. b, we would have and thus substituting the value of i from above equation we get,

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 21
Multi-loop circuits
Resistances in Parallel

The current in each actual resistance in Fig. (a) as

where V is the potential difference between a and b. If we apply the junction rule at point a in Fig. (a) and then substitute
these values, we find

In Fig. b, we would have and thus substituting the value of i from above equation we get,

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 22

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 23

In Fig. 27-46, ℰ = 12.0 V, R1 = 2000 Ω, R2 = 3000 Ω, and R3 = 4000 Ω. What

are the potential differences (a) VA – VB, (b) VB – VC, (c) VC – VD, and (d) VA – VC?

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 24
RC circuits
Charging a capacitor: The capacitor of capacitance C in the figure is initially
uncharged. To charge it, we close switch S on point a.

The charge on the capacitor increases according to

in which C = q0 is the equilibrium (final) charge and RC=τ is the capacitive time
constant of the circuit. During the charging, the current is

And the voltage is:

Dr. Mohammad Haidar

 25
RC circuits
Discharging a capacitor: Assume now that the capacitor of the figure is fully charged to a
potential V0 equal to the emf of the battery. At a new time t=0, switch S is thrown from
a to b so that the capacitor can discharge through resistance R.

Figure: RC circuit
When a capacitor discharges through a resistance R, the charge on the capacitor decays
according to

where q0 (=CV0) is the initial charge on the capacitor.

During the discharging, the current is

Dr. Mohammad Haidar