METHOD:
We collect all of the equipment, which is in the list above, and assemble it in as it is shown below:
We then pass a 4, 5, 6 and 8 volts from the power pack through the entire circuit. We take the readings from both the ammeter and the voltmeter and record them down in a table. We then repeat the process I have just described with a longer piece of Nicrome wire. We then go onto the different volts being passed through the circuit and record each voltage in its own table.
We are using a beaker full of water in this experiment because when you pass higher volts of electricity through the circuit the wire can get very hot and break itself so we use the water to keep it cool and to ensure that the wire wont break while we are doing this experiment.
We can then determine whether or not the resistance changes with the length of the wire.
We must be careful when doing this experiment as the wire can get very hot and it could be harmful if you were to touch it when the power pack is still on. We should also wear safety goggles to protect our eyes.
FACTORS THAT MAY AFFECT MY RESULTS:
The water that we are using was to make sure the temperature didn’t change during the experiment, and we used the sane water throughout all of the real work that we recorded so the water may have heated up and affected the results.
We can overcome this by making sure the temperature stays the same by cooling the water throughout the temperature with ice and monitoring the temperature with a thermometer
The wires may have been giving poor results due to overuse during the experiments.
We lost some wires while doing this and had to cut more wires and if we cut them longer or shorter it may affect the results.
The Voltmeter or the Ammeter may have been faulty and been giving off incorrect results.
As you can see the resistance is a steady line, which goes up relatively straight, however the rogue values are there because of incorrect results due to poor accuracy of equipment.
Notice that each measurement is higher than the one before it. This backs up the hypothesis that as length increases so does resistance
The rogue value at the start of the results is due to a calculation error or an error from the measurement devices.
CONCLUSION:
I conclude that my hypothesis is correct as to when the length of a wire increases so does the resistance.
This is because of the number of atoms, which the electrons have to pass through makes it harder, hence the name resistance. This is all correct.
All of the results when put into a graph showed an almost identical line every time except for the number results.
This justifies what was said in the earlier paragraph.
However we should have taken into account the length of the other connector wires we were using as it may have affected the results we were getting.
Overall the experiment went well with a few minor mistakes along the way but we resolved them after a while.
We only had trouble with setting up the circuit as we had the leads in the wrong holes etc.
We could investigate this more if we had much more accurate equipment and if we took into account, humidity and air temperature while doing these.
PRELIMINARY WORK:
We did this preliminary work to make sure we were doing the experiment correctly and if not we could make changes.
We also do it to compare the answers we get and to make sure they are realistic.
Some of our answers were far off what we got in preliminary tests which tells us that the resistance varies if you use different equipment.
