Week 9: Electronics 1

Major Terms

The units that are mainly used in math and science fields are SI units. The 7 major SI units are kilograms, meters, seconds, amperes, moles, kelvins, and candelas. These units can be used to create other units, which are in the chart below.

SI units can also have prefixes, such as kilo, centi, deci, or milli, which designate the multiple of the SI unit you are working with.
When working with electricity, the main units that we use are voltage, amperage (or current), and resistance. These can be understood using an analogy related to water. When looking at the diagram below at the pipe labeled voltage, you can see that the water wants to go from a place where there is water to the place where there isn't. This is just like how within electricity, the charge wants to flow from an area with a lot of charge to the areas with little charge. For amperage, it all depends on the current of the water. The larger pipe allows for more water to flow through it, which means there is more current. The smaller pipe allows for less of a flow of water, ie, less current. Amperage is simply the amount of charge that is flowing. In the last drawing, the sort of blockage in the second pipe causes the water to flow within it with less ease. It adds resistance, which makes it harder for the water to flow. Resistance is what resists the charge from flowing.

When looking at these terms as actual definitions, voltage represents a difference in electrical potential energy, amperage represents the flow rate of charge, and resistance represents how much the charge is impeded.

In electricity, a closed circuit is a circuit where the current can flow completely and continuously through a path. An open circuit is where this cannot happen, as something is not fully connected.

A short circuit occurs when there is too little resistance within the circuit and the flow becomes too much to handle. This is bad.

A series circuit is a circuit where there are multiple resistors that are in series with one another ie. they are lined up next to one another. A parallel circuit is a circuit where the resistors are in parallel with one another. Each forms their own loop with the battery.

Some circuits aren't series or parallel, but a combination of both. In order to solve these circuits, it's best to simplify them in order to figure out the missing values. The ultimate goal is to make them similar to a simple series circuit.

Worksheet

Here's a bad picture to showed that I went to Kevin's office hours for help!

Here are the pages my worksheet!

(also just fyi the third picture is me working out the answer to the last problem, the last picture is me answering it neatly)