Conference Session

Innovations in Teaching Upper-Level Physics

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Robert Ross, University of Detroit Mercy; Eswara Venugopal

Tagged Divisions

Engineering Physics & Physics

battery. The brightness of a lamp is understood to provide a qualitativevisual measure of the amount of current flowing through that lamp. A simple extension of thisapproach allows for a quantitative study of the behavior of an RC circuit with a capacitor inseries with a lamp. However, the varying resistance of the lamp invalidates the solutionpresented above for the time-varying current i(t) and the definition of the time-constant. Hence adifferent approach is needed to solve for the circuit characteristics.Kirchoff’s Voltage Law for a capacitor in series with a resistance R leads to the equation Q ε − iR − = 0 , (3