Heating and Lighting Effect of Current Electricity

There are various uses of electricity in our daily life. We use electricity to light our homes, heat our rooms, to electroplate metals and many more. While using electricity, we are basically converting electrical energy to various forms according to our need. These conversions of energy can also be regarded as the effect of electricity. There are various effects of current and we will talk about two of those in here.

1. Heating effect:
   
   
   

   Though a conductor can easily conduct electricity it also resists the flow in some way. The resistance is due to the atoms of the conductors. The atoms are not arranged in a linear form and are scattered (and they are moving randomly so may collide with the electric charge flowing in the wire) in the wire. So there is a significant obstruction to the movement of electricity. This resistance can produce the heating effect. When colliding with each other, they produce heat. This heating effect can be increased by use of the heating element. The heating element is the special coil made from Nichrome wire. Nichrome wire, made from an alloy of nickel wire and chromium wire, though a conductor possesses significant resistance. It also has a high boiling point and do not react with atmospheric oxygen at high temperature so can be heated to high temperature.

2. Lighting Effect:

   Lighting effect of electricity can be achieved by various ways. We will study mostly two ways we get the lighting effect of electricity.

   Filament lamp:

   
   
   

   The mechanism of lighting is also similar to the heating effect. When the wire gets hot due to the resistance it produces heat and light at the same time. But we can use a different alloy of metals to get more lighting effect than heating effect. For more heating effect we used Nichrome but for light, we have to use Tungsten metal. Tungsten metal has higher resistance it can be heated up to 33000°C as it melts at 34000°C. But tungsten metal reacts with atmospheric oxygen when heated, so it has to be enclosed in glass bulb with an inert gas, Nitrogen or Argon, with it. Instead of filling with inert gas the bulb can be made a vacuum. Out of the total energy, only 10% is converted into the light energy and rest is converted into heat.

   Fluorescent lamp:

   
   
   

   The lighting mechanism of the fluorescent lamp is different from the filament lamp. The fluorescent lamp has a coating of fluorescent powder inside its glass. The lamp is filled with mercury vapor from inside and sealed with two sticking electrodes in each side. The electricity is carried from one electrode to another electrode through mercury vapors. When the electricity flows through the bulb the electrons excite mercury vapors and the excited mercury vapor emits ultraviolet rays. Those ultraviolet rays, when to strike with the inner coating of the bulb, produce visible light. Since we use mercury vapor in the tube it is also called mercury bulb (tube).