Jump to content

Electronics/KVL

From Wikibooks, open books for an open world

Electronics | Foreword | Basic Electronics | Complex Electronics | Electricity | Machines | History of Electronics | Appendix | edit


Kirchoff's Voltage Law

[edit | edit source]

Kirchoff's laws can be described with a sentence as, What comes in, must go out. It's that simple. You have a potential on one side of a battery, then you need the negative potential on the other side of the battery. You have a current into a junction, the same current must go out of the junction.

in a circuit

in series voltage drops and current stays constant in parallel voltage stays constant and current divides according to the resistance

voltage stays constant in parallel and current drops in p

Voltage is the potential between two charges.

The nice things about potentials is you can add or subtract them in series to make a larger or smaller potential as is commonly done in batteries.

In parallel voltage...

The flow a circuit is that of a potential drop. Electrons flow from areas of high potential to ground which is low potential. At a given place in a circuit there are numerous paths to ground. Each of them has the same voltage as they have the same potential from ground.

All the components of a circuit have resistance that acts as a potential drop.