Encyclopedia > Kirchhoffs Current Law

  Article Content

Kirchhoff's Laws

Redirected from Kirchhoffs Current Law

Kirchhoff's laws deal with the conservation of energy and conservation of charge when applied to electrical circuits. Although named after Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, they are often also wrongly called Kirchoff's laws. Kirchhoff stated another set of laws, also known as Kirchhoff's laws, relating to radiation from incandescent objects, so to avoid ambiguity the electrical laws described in this article are sometimes known as Kirchhoff's rules. The two rules were first described in 1845.

Kirchhoff's first law

This law is also called Kirchhoff's current law, Kirchhoff's point rule and Kirchhoff's first rule.

The principle of conservation of electric charge implies that:

At any point in an electrical circuit, the sum of currents flowing towards that point is equal to the sum of currents flowing away from that point.

Kirchhoff's second law

This law is also called Kirchhoff's voltage law, Kirchhoff's loop rule and Kirchhoff's second rule.

The principle of conservation of energy implies that:

The directed sum of the electrical potential differences around a circuit must sum to zero. Otherwise, it would be possible to build a perpetual motion machine that passed a current in a circle around the circuit.

Read further



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz

... (1870). Between 1838 and 1840 in conjunction with FW Schubert, he published an edition of the works of Kant, to which he appended a history of the Kantian doctrine. ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 38.3 ms