Lab Report: How does voltage affect the
current in my circuit?
Isa Tiry
April 4, 2011
Period 3
Physics
How does voltage affect the current in my circuit?
For this project we studied electricity in circuits. Electricity in a circuit can
be described by its current, resistance and voltage. Voltage is energy per charge
in a circuit. It is measured in volts. Current is the flow of electricity in a circuit and
is measured in amps. Resistance, which is measured in ohms, is the thing that
slows current down in a circuit. Ohm’s Law is that more voltage creates more
current and more resistance creates less current.
For this project, we designed our own experiment to answer the question: How
does the voltage affect the current in my circuit? Our hypothesis was that if we
increased the voltage then the current would increase, as well, because of Ohm’s
Law.
Methods:
Procedure:
1. Design circuit
2. Set up circuit
3. Connect batteries and lights
4. Measure current with multimeter
5. Increase voltage
6. Measure current with multimeter again
7. Repeat as many times as needed
Materials:

Batteries of varying voltage

Wire

Christmas lights (or other small lights)

Electric tape

Cardboard
Data:
This graph shows that current increase with voltage.
Conclusion:
We predicted that the current would increase because of Ohm’s Law. Our
results support our hypothesis because our data clearly shows that the current
increased as we as we added voltage. One source of error could be that we read
the multimeter wrong. Another source of error is we could have used the wrong
amount of voltage. A third source of error could be that we used an inconsistent
amount of resistance.