4/16 Electric Potential

We derived equations that would calculate the electric potential at different points. We calculated first when the point is a distance x from the center of the ring. We found that we could use the radius and the distance x to calculate the distance from the point to the ring at all parts of the ring. We then calculated the electric potential at a point x away from the top of the ring. This was more difficult because we did not have a constant distance away from the ring at all points on the ring. We had to use trig to come up with a way to sub in for the distance from the point to the ring.

We calculated for the electric potential a different way by using the integral of E * dA. We calculated for the electric potential of when the point is a distance x from the center of the ring and found that we ended up with the same answer as the one we did when he used V = kq/r to derive the answer.

We did the same problem except we used excel to calculate the numerical values of the electric potential at each segment of the ring. Since there were 20 segments, we came up with 20 different values for the electric potential at each segment of the ring. 

We are given a a problem of a point that is above a rod (not above its center) and were asked to find the electric potential of the point on any part of the rod. The distance from the point to the rod was not uniform and ended up with a radical in the denominator that could not be integrated without using integration techniques.

We did an experiment with a multimeter to find the difference in electric potential from a negative charge to another point on the conductive paper. We used the voltage meter to see that the electric potential between the negative and positive was 15V. We then grabbed the two ends of the wire and put them on the conductive paper to see what the electric difference was when the two points were at different distances.

We recorded the electric potential at the different points on the table to the right and answered the questions.