Heating Effec of Electric Cuyrrent
Lesson 11. Topic “Heating effect of an electric current”. Grammar material: Articles. Text: “Heating effect of an electric current”. The production of heat is perhaps the most familiar among the principal effects of an electric current, either because of its development in the filaments of the electric lamps or, may be, because of the possible danger from overloaded wires. As you know, of course, a metal wire carrying a current will almost always be at a higher temperature than the temperature of that very wire unless it carries any current. It means that an electric current passing along a wire will heat that wire and may even cause it to become red-hot. Thus, the current can be detected by the heat developed provided it flows along the wire. The reader is certain to remember that the heat produced per second depends both upon the resistance of the conductor and upon the amount of current carried through it. As a matter of fact, if some current flowed along a thin wire and then the same amount of current were sent through a thicker one, a different amount of heat would be developed in both wires. When the current is sent through the wire which is too thin to carry it freely, then more electric energy will be converted into heat than in the case of a thick wire conducting a small current. Let us suppose now that a small current is flowing along a thick metal conductor. Under such conditions the only way to discover whether heat has been developed is to make use of a sensitive thermometer because the heating is too negligible to be detected by other means. If, however, our conductor were very thin while the current were large the amount of generated heat would be much greater than that produced in the thick wire. In fact, one could easily feel it. Thus, we see that the thinner the wire, the greater the developed heat. On the contrary, the larger the wired the more negligible is the heat produced. Needless to say, such heat is greatly desirable at times but at other