What is voltage Drop?

Question

What is voltage drop?

And how much would occur in a small experimental circuit with;

6 volt power pack, 10 ohm resistor.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Voltage drop is the voltage expressed when current is passed though a resistance. Sometimes called "IR drop", which means that the voltage (E) is computed as I*R.

In your experiment, the IR drop across a 10 ohm resistor will be... just a tiny bit less than 6V. That's because there's a very small amount of loss in the wires connecting it to your power source: the wires have IR drops of their own. If you connect very long wires the wiring drop will be significant.

But no matter what you do all the IR (voltage) drops in your experiment will add up to 6V. That's Kirchoff's "voltage law" (link below.)

Answer 2

I can give you the formula, but I really need the conductor size(if not in circular mils then the AWG is ok...What you do is multiply 2 times 12.9 (a constant for a CU conductor) times the current times the wire length and divide this product by the circular mil size of your wire. Hope this helped you, good luck!

Answer 3

voltage drop can be any voltage but commonly used to mean the voltage drop in a wire or cable.

Not enough info to determine voltage drop in your example, although with good wiring, the voltage across the 10 ohm resistor is 6 volts.

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