Thursday, 8 March 2012

Conventional current vs. Electron flow

There's a lot of confusion about currents, and that's because there's the conventional current and the electron flow--the electron flow being the one that actually conducts electricity..

When electrons move, an electric current is produced. In short, electric current is formed by moving electrons.

Conventional current and electron flow-always confuzzles people

This is just a basic explanation of why one goes from positive to negative and the other is from negative to positive. Hope this clears things up! 

An electric current is actually caused by a flow of electrons moving from a negatively charged end to a positively charged end. This movement of electrons towards the positively charged end is known as electron flow. 

In the early days before the discovery of electrons, scientists thought that an electric current consisted of positive charges flowing from a positively charged end to a negatively charged end. 
This assumption is still widely held today because the discovery of electron movement did not affect the basic understanding of an electric current, which consists of moving charges. 
This idea is so strong that scientists today still adopt it and they have termed it conventional current flow (since this is the convention adopted by most). 




3 comments:

  1. i wanted o ask lyk in IGs exams if we are asked abt electron flow we'll mention the flow from negative to positive ryt ?

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  2. I think you got it wrong on the point regarding electric current in a solid metallic conductor

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  3. Hi, this is kind of off topic. But I just wanted to ask that on another blog page I saw that you got A* for doing single science. but in my school if we do single science the highest grade we can get is C. I was wondering why it was different? By the way thank you so much for making this blog and making it so easy for other people to read I understand a lot of the things now so thank you. xxxx

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