Electric Flux

     Not surprisingly, we were asked to answer some questions about electric flux from the ActivPhysics website. The questions concerned how electric flux is affected by the magnitude and the sign of the electric charge that is contained in a closed surface, and the answers to those questions can be seen in the picture above. Overall, it was determined that the electric flux through a surface is directly proportional to the magnitude of the electric charge contained in the surface. Also, the sign of the electric flux is the same as the total charge contained in the surface.

     On Monday, we were also asked to construct a graph of electric flux vs. the angle of the normal vector. We used a wire square and a small bed of  nails to come up with a series of data points. First we simply laid the wire square on the bed of nails so that it contained 49 nails. The angle of the normal vector in this case was obviously 0 degrees. We then angled the wire so that it contained 42 nails and determined the angle by taking the inverse sine of the height of the square wire at that particular instance and its length. We continued to do this in decreasing increments of 7 nails until we reached zero and then used symmetry to determine the angles of up to -49 nails. These points were plotted in LoggerPro and a graph was constructed. There is a shift in the second portion of our graph, but the graph should be that of the cosine function. This graph makes sense because the electric flux through a surface can be expressed as EAcosTheta.