What affects the resistance of the wire?

1. Length of the wire because the longer the wire, the longer it will take for the electrons to get to the end. This is because there will be more collisions between the electrons and atoms. So the length of the wire would be proportional to the resistance.
2. Material of the wire is very important the best material is silver, but because it’s expensive we use copper, copper makes the resistance flow faster. because if the material being used has atoms with a large number of electrons this means there are more electrons, so if the material has a large number of atoms there should be less resistance
3. Temperature affects the resistance of the wire because in a hot weather the length of the wire gets bigger the molecules are separated (If a wire is heated the atoms will move around). This would cause more collisions between the atoms and the electrons, and the increase in collisions would increase the resistance. A metal (a hot wire) has more resistance than a cold wire.
4. Thickness of the wire (cross sectional of wire) a thin wire has more resistance than a thick wire because of the increase in volume of the thick wire. The increase in volume means that there are more electrons flowing.

The factor that I am going to investigate is the length. I make the wire smaller every time to see the change in the amps and the voltage, I repeat these 3 times to make it more reasonable.

This table shows the voltage and the amps:-

This table shows the average voltage and amps:-

This table shows the resistance:-

Conclusion:-

My graph shows that my experiment is accurate but I may have gone wrong because the resistance should have gone down but in some cases didn’t e.g. for 10cm it was 1.3 ohms.

As I predicted the longer the wire the more the resistance and I can see this on my table because when the wire was 80cm it had 2.3ohms but by the end e.g. 30 cm it went down to 1.1ohms.

I conclude by saying the shorter the wire the less the resistance and the longer the wire the more the resistance.

Improvements:

If I had to improve my experiment I would cut pieces of wire into different sizes instead of moving my crocodile clip up to different measurements. Because it might not be very accurate but if I cut different sizes of wire (a bit longer than what it should be so we can tape it to the ruler).