4 ms·

Unfortunately, water isn't as simple as electricity. Pipes almost always end up having turbulent flow inside, in which case, pressure drop is proportional to f

• mikewarot 5y ago
  If you force enough current through a wire, the Lorenz force can cause it to pinch in on itself and disintegrate. Copper wires aren't so simple at high currents, high voltages, or high frequencies.
• CamperBob2 5y ago
  Whereas for electricity, voltage drop is always proportional to current. The water metaphor works fine for many DC circuit comparisons, up to and including basic transistor operation. Meanwhile, at AC, your statement above doesn't hold up much better than the water analogy would. Lots of additional terms come into play... skin effect, radiative losses, displacement current and phasor relationships, even quantum effects. Every once in a while, a huge Internet argument springs up among people who don't understand that the Ohm and Kirchoff laws represent the steady-state map and not the time-variant territory. Do a search on eevblog for "Lewin," for instance. (Actually that's terrible advice. Don't do that, and forget I said anything.)
• lagrange77 5y ago
  While this is true, these analogies do have limits of applicability, like all models have. They are only valid down to a specific point of abstraction and only within certain bounds. You just have to be aware of the limits of your analogies, to use them as a tool, an educational one in this context. That's how modelling works.