Ohm's Law Lab

Eamon Barkhordarian Group Members: Asaf Rotman Malik Gill Shang Yip
3/4/2012 Period C APB Physics
Ohms Law Lab Purpose: To perform an experimental check of Ohm's Law by determining the relationship between current, voltage, and resistance. We also are doing this lab to practice constructing electric circuits and to understand voltmeters, ammeters, and real batteries/power supplies. Background: The first, and perhaps most important, relationship between current, voltage, and resistance is called Ohm's Law, discovered by Georg Simon Ohm and published in his 1827 paper, The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically. Ohm expressed his discovery in the form of a simple equation known as Ohms Law, which describes the relationship between the current flowing through resistance, R and the potential drop across it. Ohms Law states that voltage is directly proportional to the product of the current and the resistance. Voltage is quantitative expression of the electromotive force in charge between two points in an electrical field Current a flow of electric charge through a conductor (expressed in amps) Volts is the SI unit of electromotive force (expressed as V) Resistance is the opposition to the passage of an electric current through that element (expressed in Ohms ())
Below are the instrumentals we will be using for measurements: A voltmeter is an instrument for measuring electric potential in volts. An ammeter is an instrument for measuring electric current in amperes. Terminal Voltage is the sum of the individual battery cell voltages.
Methods: We did this experiment using the 0-12 setting for voltage. We take one wire connected to the power supply and bring the other end to the left side of the breadboard. We then took another wire and placed it in one of the holes within the same column as the previous wire connected. We took the other side of this new wire and brought it to next
section of the breadboard. Taking the LED now, we connected it to the same row as the wire we had just placed, and brought the other side of the LED to the next section of the breadboard. Now we take the resistor and replicate what we have done with the LED light for the next section of the breadboard, making sure it is all on the same row. Finally, we have an outgoing wire that is connected to a multimeter to measure current and to check the amount of voltage supplied. We continued this experiment multiple times constantly changing the size of the resistor.
Data: Voltage 3.7 5 8.1 9.9 10.4 3.1 6.4 8 10.3 10.5 4.7 6.2 7.6 7.9 9.6 10.6 5.1 5.5 6.6 6.9 9.3 11 Current (Amps) 0.0026 0.0034 0.0055 0.0067 0.0071 0.0021 0.0044 0.0054 0.007 0.0071 0.004 0.005 0.006 0.007 0.008 0.009 0.00132 0.00141 0.00171 0.00177 0.0028 0.0056 Resistance () 30 30 30 30 30 6,000 6,000 6,000 6,000 6,000 30,000 30,000 30,000 30,000 30,000 30,000 120 120 120 120 120 120
Analysis and Conclusion: Once again, I chose to use a linear line of best fit and was right in choosing to do so. We have an r squared value of .9813 for the resistor strength of 30000 , an r squared value of .9997 for the resistor strength of 6000 , an r squared value of .9997 for the resistor strength of 30 , and an r squared value of .8674 for the resistor strength of 120 . All these r squared values are extremely close to 1. Because the r squared value was so close to one, it shows that the linear trend line is the best one to use. The relationship between voltage and current is linear. Since the slopes that I calculated are very small like 8.47 x 10 -4, it is not strongly linear. The voltage must increase by a lot to increase the current by a small amount. The inverse of the slopes are supposed to get the value of the resistor since the units of slope were Amps/V and the inverse was V/Amps. The equation for resistance in Ohms law is V/Amps so that verifies that the inverse of the slope is the resistance. But in my case the numbers seemed irrelevant. For example, for a resistor value of 30,000 Ohms, I would get an inverse slope of 1180. Since my numbers do not add up, I must say I have failed in proving the Ohms law equation in this lab. There must have been some mistakes made along the way. At one point, we had forgotten to use a resistor and blew out an LED light. Maybe one of our mistakes was that the wire was not connected to the breadboard firmly enough, not giving us an accurate reading. Another potential mistake could have been that we had not calculated the correct resistance. We might have not looked at the key correctly to multiply and add the values. This could have thrown our supposed resistance value off.
Once again the equation is , stating that V is proportional to current. In my lab I proved that that is true (as voltage increased, current also increased.) I also showed that as you increase the resistance, the current increases.

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Eamon Barkhordarian Group Members: Asaf Rotman Malik Gill Shang Yip

3/4/2012 Period C APB Physics

3/4/2012 Period C APB Physics

3/4/2012 Period C APB Physics

3/4/2012 Period C APB Physics

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