An electrical insulator is a material in which electric current does not flow freely. The atoms of the insulator have tightly bound electrons which cannot readily move. Other materials, semiconductors and conductors conduct electric current more easily. The property that distinguishes an insulator is its resistivity; insulators have higher resistivity than semiconductors or conductors. The most common examples are non-metals.
A perfect insulator does not exist because even insulators contain small numbers of mobile charges (charge carriers) which can carry current. In addition, all insulators become electrically conductive when a sufficiently large voltage is applied that the electric field tears electrons away from the atoms. This is known as the breakdown voltage of an insulator. Some materials such as glass, paper and Teflon, which have high resistivity, are very good electrical insulators. A much larger class of materials, even though they may have lower bulk resistivity, are still good enough to prevent significant current from flowing at normally used voltages, and thus are employed as insulation for electrical wiring and cables. Examples include rubber-like polymers and most plastics which can be thermoset or thermoplastic in nature.
Insulators are used in electrical equipment to support and separate electrical conductors without allowing current through themselves. An insulating material used in bulk to wrap electrical cables or other equipment is called insulation. The term insulator is also used more specifically to refer to insulating supports used to attach electric power distribution or transmission lines to utility poles and transmission towers. They support the weight of the suspended wires without allowing the current to flow through the tower to ground.
Hi all
A conductor is a conductor, because it has an unfilled energy band. Likewise, insulators have filled bands, hence they do not conduct.
Now, these two statements say nothing about the mobility of the electrons. How is it that an unfilled band is equivalent of mobile electrons, while a...
i want to paint my electrical componets and my transformer with a spray paint with a color of metallic black, does metallic paint contain metals? won't this short short circuit anything?
Hello all, I'm just getting to grips with conduction in solids and am trying to find some values for the band gap between the valence and the conduction bands. All I can find anywhere are typical values for semiconductors (or about an eV). I also found that carbon in the diamond configuration...
Casimir says that there is a force between two neutral metal plates when they are close..suppose if we replace the metal plates with insulators,will there be the same casimir force? what is the difference? why casimir used metal plates,he could have used insulator also?i think insulator is also...
Hi,
I'm looking for an inexpensive liquid, that should be used as an insulator.
My first pondering was if there is a way of converting water to insulators.
Thanks in advanced.
Homework Statement
A balloon, initially neutral, is rubbed with fur until it acquires a net charge of -0.60nC. (a) Assuming that only electrons are transferred, were electrons removed from the balloon or added to it? (b) how many electrons were transferred?
Net Charge = Q = -0.60 nCHomework...
Hi all.
I was thinking of something: Bound charges in an insulator arise because of the polarisation, so even though we have bound surface and volume charges, an insulator will still be electrically neutral.
I was trying to apply this line of though to a magnetized object. Here, the...
Every conductor or insulator becomes/is believed to become perfectly conducting at o kelvin
Similarly every resistor should also have some upper limit i.e. it should become insulator at some very high temperature?
Is it so?
Please explain...
As I understand it, conductors interact with EM waves (light) in such a way that
prevents transmission through the conductive material.
Given this, why aren't all insulators transparent?
Why is SiO2 transparent, but Si by itself is not?
Any and all information helpful.
TIA,
yert
I am going to attach the question along with this post so that you guys can see the questions and the diagram and be able to help me in answering my question better.
I found the ccharge on the inner sphere and it is -3.928e-9 and the charge on the outer sphere is 8.15698e-9.
Now I have to...