Ohm’s Law explains how amperes, resistance, and voltage work together in a circuit. It states that electric current is proportional to voltage and inversely proportional to resistance. It was discovered by German physicist George Simon Ohm and can be written as I = V/R. The law has practical applications in household appliances and equipment.
Ohm’s law is a law used in physics that basically explains how electricity works properly within a simple circuit. To explain the electrical process, the law shows how the three elements of electricity – amperes, resistance and voltage – work together to create a functioning electrical circuit. The law states that the amount of electric current, measured in amperes, traveling through a conductor is proportional to or equal to the voltage, but is inversely proportional to the resistance in the conductor.
The proponent and namesake of the law was George Simon Ohm, a renowned German physicist in the early 1800s. While working as a professor at the Jesuit high school in Cologne in Germany, he experimented and observed the behavior of electricity in simple circuits with different lengths of thread. He described and documented all the results in a book, “The Galvanic Circuit Mathematically Investigated,” which was initially rejected but later acknowledged, leading to the establishment of Ohm’s Law.
Ohm’s law can be written in a simple mathematical equation: I = V/R, where I is for electric current measured in amperes, V is for voltage, and R is for resistance. In this equation, resistance is usually a constant variable, since its value does not depend on the amount of electric current, but rather on the materials used to make the circuit, such as the wires and the resistor itself. The formula can be expressed in other inverse forms such as V = IR or R = V/I. These inverted formulas can help you find the value of one item if the values of the other two items are already identified.
There are essentially three “truth” statements that one should remember about Ohm’s Law. The first statement is that the value of I will increase or decrease if the value of V increases or decreases, respectively. The second claim is that the value of I will decrease if the value of R increases and the value of V does not change. The third claim is that the value of I will increase if the value of R decreases and the value of V remains the same.
The principle of Ohm’s law can be practically applied in household appliances and in any equipment powered by electricity or battery. For example, a simple light-emitting diode (LED) requires only 2 volts 0.2 amps to light up, but is connected to a 6-volt battery. This could cause the LED to short out and you need a resistor to reduce the current. Using the formula R = V/I, it can be determined that a resistor containing 200 ohms is needed to control the current entering the LED.
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