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Posts: 1002
Location: Texas
Joined: December 6, 2009
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"They organize the electron flow.
Reducing "turbulence" of electron flow.DanL" We can give this a bit more context, and make it a bit more quantitative. I imagine that you are thinking that the electrons in the wire are going to start swirling around and their motion could become turbulent, as they rush back and forth along the wire, carrying the current? In fact, if a 1 mm diameter wire is carrying a current of 1 amp, the drift velocity of the electrons will be about one tenth of a millimetre per second. So if that wire were a power cable, then with the 60Hz AC current, the net amplitude of the back and forth motion of the electrons, in order to carry that current, would probably be less than one micro-metre. So when you spoke earlier of "the electron flow being a matter of inches in AC," and the "last foot" of wire mattering the most, you should perhaps have spoken of the "last micro-metre" of wire mattering the most? If you stuck to your own argument, but with the actual figures for the amplitude of the electron drift amplitude, you would have to say that the power cord was completely irrelevant to the discussion, since the electrons move back and forth by only a micro-metre or so. But that, I think, highlights the fact that you cannot point to any one particular segment of the wire from the power station to your amplifier and claim that that particular segment is the important one. I think your model of how electricity is transferred, and what are the dominant effects, is somewhat flawed. By the way, by contrast to that net drift velocity of order 1/10 of a millimetre per second, the actual typical velocity of the individual electrons in the conductor, in random motion, will be of order 1000 miles per second or so. So the net drift velocity resulting from the conduction of the current is completely insignificant in comparison to the velocity of the random motion of the electrons. Chris
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