Lectures on Physics has been derived from Benjamin Crowell's Light and Matter series of free introductory textbooks on physics. See the editorial for more information....

Dependence of resistance on cross-sectional area

We have alluded briefly to the fact that an object's electrical resistance depends on its size and shape, but now we are ready to begin making more mathematical statements about it. As suggested by the figure, increasing a resistors's cross-sectional area is equivalent to adding more resistors in parallel, which will lead to an overall decrease in resistance. Any real resistor with straight, parallel sides can be sliced up into a large number of pieces, each with cross-sectional area of, say, 1 μm2. The number, N, of such slices is proportional to the total cross- sectional area of the resistor, and by application of the result of the previous example we therefore find that the resistance of an object is inversely proportional to its cross-sectional area.

An analogous relationship holds for water pipes, which is why high-flow trunk lines have to have large cross-sectional areas. To make lots of water (current) flow through a skinny pipe, we'd need an impractically large pressure (voltage) difference.




Last Update: 2010-11-11