Effective current and effective voltage

[AlanP]

What is it? Ive googled it and found that the effective current is the magnitude of an alternating current having the same heating effect as that of a given magnitude of direct current. What does it mean? Does it have to do something with Joule effect? Could someone clarify this, in layman's terms?

Thank you very much

Alan

 

[GreenGiant]

Direct Current will give you one constant value, where Alternating Current will be changing, going high to low to high to low over and over and over, effective current is basically the average of these highs and lows

Hope this helps

 

[(*steve*)]

Well, it's a bit more complex than average.

Look up Root Mean Square (or RMS)

It's a fancy mathematical way of expressing a voltage or current in a way that compares it to a DC voltage or current that would have the same heating effect (essentially transfer the same power).

If you know calculus, it is essentially calculated by getting the area under the curve.

 

[GreenGiant]

Well, it's a bit more complex than average.

Look up Root Mean Square (or RMS)

It's a fancy mathematical way of expressing a voltage or current in a way that compares it to a DC voltage or current that would have the same heating effect (essentially transfer the same power).

If you know calculus, it is essentially calculated by getting the area under the curve.

I know it is more complicated than average, I was just giving a simple idea, thanks for elaborating though

 

[(*steve*)]

I know it is more complicated than average,

I was expanding on your answer, not disagreeing with you.

Let's say, it's a very special type of average.

 

[larsen81]

I really appreciate about the explaination you gave for this.

 

[Laplace]

When you bring calculus into the picture it becomes possible to calculate the RMS value for any arbitrary waveform (the hard part is to integrate the square of the voltage over one cycle). But is it possible to measure the RMS value of any waveform? It should be possible for a digital processing oscilloscope to calculate the RMS value of a waveform. Otherwise the only voltmeters I am familiar with all assume that the input waveform is a sine wave which is rectified and displayed as a DC voltage on an RMS scale. For instance, the RMS value of a DC voltage should be the DC voltage value. When I use a VOM to measure the voltage of a 9V battery, the DC voltage is 9.4V When I measure the battery as AC, the RMS value is 12V. The only sense I can make of that is, Don't try to measure the RMS value of anything except an AC sine wave. Indeed, VAC implies the RMS value of an alternating current (AC) sine wave.