What Is Conventional Current Flow

All descriptions of electronic circuits use conventional current so if you see an arrow depicting current flow in a circuit diagram you know it is showing the direction of conventional current flow.

What is conventional current flow. Conventional current flow refers to a flow of positive charges. What is conventional current flow. Electron flow is what actually happens and electrons flow out of the negative terminal through the circuit and into the positive terminal of the source. This illustrates conventional current flow.

You may follow an imagined direction of current conventional flow or the actual electron flow with equal success insofar as circuit analysis is concerned. The direction of conventional current is arbitrarily defined as the direction in which positive charges flow. In the image below we can see current moving from the positive terminal of the battery through the resistance to the negative terminal of the battery. Conventional current flow is the standard that almost all of the world follows to solve a circuit problem.

I m gonna flip the battery around it until the positive terminal is on the top and i ll put my circuit over on the side over here like this. Conventional current flow is the one most often used. If as is often the case the real current is an electron flow negative charges then the. It states that electrons flow from positive to negative.

Conventional current and electron current identification. Conventional current or in other words the standard current is measured in the opposite direction of the flow of the negative charges i e. Conventional current assumes that current flows out of the positive terminal through the circuit and into the negative terminal of the source. Concepts of voltage current resistance continuity and even mathematical treatments such as ohm s law chapter 2 and kirchhoff s laws chapter 6 remain just as valid with either style of notation.

It is a kind of ficticious current. This was the convention chosen during the discovery of electricity. Conventional current is the flow of a positive charge from positive to negative and is the reverse of real electron flow. Consider circuit diagram with voltage source as battery and the resistance r is connected with a voltage source.

So now i m gonna redraw my circuit and my battery. The conventional current direction or the current direction is this way. Negatively charged carriers such as the electrons the charge carriers in metal wires and many other electronic circuit components therefore flow in the opposite direction of conventional current flow in an electrical circuit.