ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

Hello folks,

Let us start our discussion with the basics of electrical engineering. Have you ever investigated about wall outlet, which is the most common voltage source that we can find everywhere?

In olden days, we used to find 2 holes in the wall outlet but now-a-days we can see 3 holes in the wall outlet in our home. These 3 terminals that are present in every socket are Live, Neutral and Earth. The load is connected between live and the neutral. The Earth terminal is mandatorily connected to the chassis of equipment because earth is always at absolute zero potential and possibility of shock can be discarded. After connecting Earth to chassis of the equipment, even if you touch the chassis you won’t get shock.

Earth pin is having more thickness as compared to other 2 pins in 3-pin wall outlet. As per the basic formula for resistance, if we increase area of cross section then resistance will decrease. So this will provide least resistance path for the leakage currents and we, the operators will be safe.

When we are putting plug in socket, the first pin to come in contact with metal inside socket is Earth pin. So before giving supply to the device we ensure that all the leakage charge is grounded. This is reason why the length of Earth Pin is larger than 2 other Pins.

If you measure voltage between Live and Neutral, you will get a pure sinusoidal wave shape. In India, maximum voltage is 325 V (230*1.414), frequency 50 Hz and time period 20mS.

The color codes of wires in a U.S. 110-volt wall outlet are :

• Copper, Green, or green with yellow stripes – Earth Pin
• White – Neutral Pin
• Black, red, or any other color – Phase Pin

Thank you for your time. Do comment about your area of interest.