Day 14 - Circuits in Series and Resistors

Lab Manual:

-Voltage measurements

Based on our measured values there was no voltage loss at all, since the initial and final values were the same. The current is also constant in the circuit.

-Parallel circuits

Based on what we measured both voltages remained constant in the parallel series resistors, and the initial and final currents are the same.

-Measuring resistors

We learned how to decode resistors by knowing which color bands stood for what value, and we could see if their color coding reflected their actual theoretical value by measuring them.


Equivalent resistance challenge problem:

Our group was given the series of resistors above and was asked to find the equivalent resistance. I was able to calculate it by doing each section individually and then breaking it down into several steps. We found the resistance to be 52.17 Ohm's. We then set up a real life version of this circuit, shown below:

The actual measured resistance of this system was 51.9 Ohm's which is very accurate considering we were using cheap 1/10th of a cent resistors.

Application of the loop rule several times

We were presented with the complex circuit above and found 3 equations in order to solve for the three I values. Eventually we were able to substitute the equations back into eachother to find alll the values, as shown below. Our values were actually incorrect because an arithmetic error was made at some point, since a calculator gave us values of 1.14, 0.99, and .14 amps, respectively.

In order to verify what we just got on the calculator, we set up a breadboard pictured below and measured the values which were 1.15, 1.005, and 0.148, respectively. In contrast these are very close to what we calculated theoretically.