Monday, March 14, 2011

Parallel Circuits and Compound (Series and Parallel Circuits)

New week means new things to learn.
Last week, we pretty much covered a whole lot of things about circuits and through what I have learnt, theres about 3 circuits we've learnt so far which are the series circuit, parallel circuit and components which is using series and parallel circuit together.

I won't ramble on about explain understood with series circuit apart from that, say if another 2 light bulbs was added to the circuit the first light bulb would take most of the 12 available voltage coming from the battery, for example the first light bulb takes 4 voltages thus having 8 available voltage remaining, and the second light bulb would take some of that 8 voltage. The third light bulb would pretty much take the remaining available voltage. The decrease of the amps makes it clear to me that the more resistance there is in a circuit, the less current flows through the circuit.

While at the parallel circuit, when we measured everything, amps, voltages and resistance also power, I have understood that through voltage in the circuit stays the same, unlike series circuit the volts change and you get different readings and it goes for amps too. Seeing as there is no resistance in the current, the results you get out of it. So pretty much the rule in a parallel circuit is that the current stays the same.

Next is compoound. It's pretty much a circuit that has parallel and series circuit combined together.
So combining with the results we had got from our practical, I managed to find out how the circuit works. In the term, power or watts... in-order for the compound circuit to work, it would need to take more watts than what a series or parallel usually uses. Though, in the lighting in the compound circuit seems to different.
When we looked at the circuit it seems that the series light bulb had affected on how the brightness was on the parallel circuit, like the series light bulb is brighter than the parallel circuits. The reason of this is because the series light bulb has more resistance thus conducting a brighter light than the parallel circuit. The parallel's bulb brightness is dimmer because the parallel circuit has low resistance which then allows for the current to flow through with only little resistance. But what happens to the amperege in the compound circuit?
Well, both light bulb one and two, the parallel circuit, shows that the amp stays the same because they don't change only cause is that the voltage among them is shared evenly, althought in the series circuit, the third light bulb represents as a resistance thus giving less current flow in the circuit.
In the voltage, what happens is that in the parallel circuit, both light bulbs 1 & 2 took a certain amount of volts from the conductor thus having the same result when you meausure them again. It's the same because in a parallel circuit, they all use the same amount of voltage, so pretty much the voltage that is given is being shared equally. If you then measure the series light bulb, you will see that there are more voltage that is being used there because it has higher resistance meaning that its pretty much taking all the remaining voltage that left after the volts had passed through the parallel circuit.

So yeah, this is pretty much my understand of each circuits. I hope you enjoyed reading, and please help me if there is in need of correcting. Thank you :)

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