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Chapter 18: Q10Q (page 755)

At a typical drift speed of 5×10-5m/s, an electron traveling at that speed would take about to travel through one of your connecting wires. Why, then, does the bulb light immediately when the connecting wire is attached to the battery?

Short Answer

Expert verified

The bulb lights immediately because mobile electrons are present throughout the circuit that start moving simultaneously when switched on.

Step by step solution

01

Given data

Drift speed of electrons = 5×10-5m/s

02

Electrical force on electrons in a circuit

The force due to electric field applied on a circuit affects all mobile electrons simultaneously.

03

Determine reason why a light bulb turns on immediately when switched on

There are mobile free electrons present throughout the circuit wire. When switched on, the applied electric field from the battery acts simultaneously on all electrons throughout the circuit and they start moving instantaneously. Thus a bulb located anywhere in the circuit is lit immediately.

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Most popular questions from this chapter

The emf of a particular flashlight battery is 1.7 V. If the battery is 4.5 cm long and radius of cylindrical battery is 1 cm, estimate roughly the amount of charge on the positive end plate of the battery.

Since there is an electric field inside a wire in a circuit, why don’t the mobile electrons in the wire accelerate continuously?

Question: The following questions refer to the circuit shown in Figure 18.114, consisting of two flashlight batteries and two Nichrome wires of different lengths and different thicknesses as shown (corresponding roughly to your own thick and thin Nichrome wires).

The thin wire is 50 cm long, and its diameter is 0.25 mm. The thick wire is 15 cm long, and its diameter is 0.35 mm. (a) The emf of each flashlight battery is 1.5 V. Determine the steady-state electric field inside each Nichrome wire. Remember that in the steady state you must satisfy both the current node rule and energy conservation. These two principles give you two equations for the two unknown fields. (b) The electron mobility

in room-temperature Nichrome is about . Show that it takes an electron 36 min to drift through the two Nichrome wires from location B to location A. (c) On the other hand, about how long did it take to establish the steady state when the circuit was first assembled? Give a very approximate numerical answer, not a precise one. (d) There are about mobile electrons per cubic meter in Nichrome. How many electrons cross the junction between the two wires every second?

What would be the potential difference VC-VBacross the thin resistor in Figure 18.103 if the battery emf is3.5V ? Assume that the electric field in the thick wires is very small (so that the potential differences along the thick wires are negligible). Do you have enough information to determine the current in the circuit?

Inside a chemical battery it is not actually individual electrons that are transported from the + end to the – end. At the + end of the battery an “acceptor” molecule picks up an electron entering the battery, and at the – end a different “donor” molecule gives up an electron, which leaves the battery. Ions rather than electrons move between the two ends to support the charge inside the battery.

When the supplies of acceptor and donor molecules are used up in a chemical battery, the battery is dead because it can no longer accept or electron. The electron current in electron per second times the number of seconds of battery life, is equal to the number of donor molecules in the battery.

A flashlight battery contains approximately half a mole of donor molecules. The electron current through a thick filament bulb powered by two flashlight batteries in series is about 0.3 A. About how many hours will the batteries keep this bulb lit?
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