Faraday’s law, Lenz’s law, and conservation of （楞次定律,法拉第定律和保护）.pdf

Faraday’s law, Lenz’s law, and conservation of energy Lowell T. Wood,a) Ray M. Rottmann, and Regina Barrera Department of Physics, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204-5005 Received 31 July 2002; accepted 12 December 2003 We describe an experiment in which the induced electromotive force in a coil caused by an accelerating magnet and the position of the moving magnet are measured as a function of the time. When the circuit is completed by adding an appropriate load resistor, a current that opposes the flux change is generated in the coil. This current causes a magnetic field in the coil which decreases the acceleration of the rising magnet, as is evident from the position versus time data. The circuit provides a direct observation of effects that are a consequence of Lenz’s law. The energy dissipated by the resistance in the circuit is shown to equal the loss in mechanical energy of the system to within experimental error, thus demonstrating conservation of energy. Students in introductory physics courses have performed this experiment successfully. © 2004 American Association of Physics Teachers. DOI: 10.1119/1.1646131 I. INTRODUCTION are collected by a computer as functions of time. Data taken 1–5 6–19 with the load resistor in the circuit verify the discussion in Many excellent demonstrations and experiments in- the previous paragraph. For comparison, the coil is con- volving Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction have nected directly to the voltage probe with no load resistor in been discussed during the last sever