Wolfram Demonstrations Project

12,000+ Open Interactive Demonstrations
Powered by Notebook Technology »

Coulomb's Law for Three Point Charges

Initializing live version
Download to Desktop

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System

Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.

Coulomb's law states that the force between two charges and separated by a distance is proportional to the signed magnitudes of the charges and inversely proportional to . In SI units, charge is measured in coulombs (C) and distance in meters (m). The constant equals , giving the force in newtons (N):

[more]

.

This Demonstration describes the interaction of three point charges. Charge 1 is fixed in space; you can vary the distances from charge 1 to charge 2 and charge 1 to charge 3, as well as the angle between charges 2 and 3. The two plots at the bottom show the forces and between charges 1 and 2 and between charges 1 and 3 as a function of distance. The top-right plot is the total force on charge 1, which is the sum of the two vectors and (so it depends on the angle between two charges):

.

[less]

Contributed by: Mina Jafari and Eitan Geva (June 2015)
Additional contributions by: Eitan Geva (University of Michigan)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Details

References:

[1] Wikipedia. "Coulomb's Law." (Jun 4, 2015) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb%27 s_law.

[2] askIITians. "Addition and Subtraction of Vectors." (Jun 4, 2015) www.askiitians.com/iit-jee-physics/general-physics/addition-and-subtraction-of-vectors.aspx.

Submission from the Compute-to-Learn course at the University of Michigan.

Snapshots

Embed Code

Take advantage of the Wolfram Notebook Emebedder for the recommended user experience.

Related Demonstrations More by Author
Browse all topics
Feedback (field required)
Email (field required) Name
Occupation Organization
Note: Your message & contact information may be shared with the author of any specific Demonstration for which you give feedback.
Send