Factors Affecting Resistance of a Wire Factors Affecting the Resistance of a Wire Introduction There are four variables that affect the resistance of a wire. These factors are THICKNESS/DIAMETER, LENGTH, MATERIAL and TEMPERATURE. The two factors I am going to discuss are thickness and length because the effect on the resistance is more measurable than the effect of resistance with material and temperature. Also we can model the effect of thickness and length The thickness of a wire affects the resistance because if you double the size of the diameter, you quadruple the resistance. Think of water in a pipe, if you double the diameter of the pipe, you quadruple the cross-section. Look at the table: RadiusЛ R2 13.14212.56318.84 If you take radius’ 1 and 2, you will see that 2 is four times as big as 1, showing that the surface area is quadrupled. This means that the resistance is quartered. The length of a wire affects the resistance because if you double the length you double the resistance. Think of a corridor with chairs in it. It would be fairly hard to get through it. Now imagine another corridor added on to the end of it, exactly the same as the first. It would be twice as long with twice as many chairs in the way, and would therefore be twice as hard to get past. You could say that the length is proportional to the resistance! A. Planning Plan of the method to be used: - The resistivity of nichrome can be determined using
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