Entry#3

Circuit Journal

 

Question:

What happens if you add more cells or light bulbs to a circuit with one battery?

Method/ Gathering data:

For my experiment I used Circuit Construction Kit to explore the effects of adding light bulbs to a complete circuit with one battery. I used one battery with two wires and one light bulb for the first test. With each test one bulb and wire was added. Up to four bulbs where tested. The wires in each experiment were all the same length in each test. The voltmeter was used to measure the volts in the bulbs.

Hypothesis:

I hypothesis is that the light bulbs will get dimmer as more light bulbs are added because the energy from the battery has to be shared between all of the light bulbs.

Observed Data/Results:

One Light Bulb

Two Light Bulbs

Three Light Bulbs

Four Light Bulbs

# of light bulbs	Voltmeter reading	Observed Brightness of bulb(s) Very bright, bright, dim, very dim	Observed speed of elections: Very fast, Fast, slow, Very Slow
1	9.00 V	Very bright	Very Fast
2	4.50 V	Dim	Slow
3	3.00V	Very Dim	Slow
4	2.25 V	Very Very dim	Very Slow

Answer:

My hypothesis was correct. As each light bulb was added the volts that each bulb could have went down and the light bulbs got dimmer. All of the bulbs shared 9.00 V from the battery. The 9.00 V were also shared equally between the bulbs, if you add up the volts from the data table for the number of each light bulb it will equal 9.00.