Question

why does a heating element get hot upon passing current through it?

Answer 1

In school we learn that some materials carry electricity well, others badly. The good carriers of electricity are called conductors, while the poor carriers are known as insulators. Conductors and insulators are often better described by talking about how much resistance they put up when an electric current flows through them. So conductors have a low resistance (electricity flows through them easily) while insulators have a much higher resistance (it's a real struggle for the electricity to get through). In an electric or electronic circuit, we can use devices called resistors to control how much current flows; using a dial to increase the resistance and lower the current in a loudspeaker circuit is a way of turning down the volume, for example.


Resistors work by converting electrical energy to heat energy; in other words, they get hot when heat flows through them. But it's not just resistors that do this. Even a thin piece of wire will get hot if you force enough electricity through it. That's the basic idea behind incandescent lamps (old-fashioned, bulb-shaped lamps). Inside the glass bulb, there's a very thin coil of wire called a filament. When enough electricity flows through it, it glows white hot—so it's really making light by making heat. Around 95 percent or so of the energy a lamp like this uses is turned into heat and completely wasted (using an energy-saving fluorescent lamp is far more efficient, because most of the electricity the lamp consumes is converted into light with hardly any wasted heat).

Answer 2

going at the microscopic level when current is passed , valence electrons speeds up or simply flow , the nucleus coming in there way creates hindrance , when they collide or nucleus repel or shifts there path they slow down and the energy they loose come in the form of heat
for an example u rub your hands in winter and they get warm , energy is converting into heat.

Answer 3

It is a simple answer but is just friction. Basically in a conductor there is no need for ionization in order to have moving charges because the atoms share the electrons. Electricity moves fast but the actual individual electrons move at a slower speed driven by the the potential difference (the voltage). They have a mean path that involves a lot of interactions.The higher the voltage, the higher the acceleration of the electrons and the more energetic the interactions. That is why the higher the voltage the hotter the conductor gets. A thin wire is a conductor with a smaller cross section than a thicker conductor and since the electrons can't jump outside of the wire, they are forced to interact more often in more energy rich interactions inside the thin wire than in the thicker wire. This is the reason why resistance is higher in the thin wire.

Answer 4

\[I ^{2}R = Watts= heat\]Heating elements use material such as tungsten having a higher resistivity than copper or aluminum