Electronic – What determines a load’s current requirements

currentloadohms-law

Apologies if this question has been asked before. I'm sure it has but hard to find as wording of question may not bring up the duplicate question.

Let us say we have a 10 ohm resistor as a load. Under a power source of 5V, it will draw a 500mA current. In this scenario, we had two "givens": the resistance and the voltage.

Now here is what I am wondering. Does a 10 ohm load think (using the above resistor as a figurative character)

"Ok, I never know how much current I need. For me to know how much current I need, I need to know what the voltage is since I already know my resistance. If your voltage is 5V, then I will take 500mA. If your voltage is 10V, I will need 1A. But don't give me more than 20V because I won't be able to handle that much of a voltage drop and 2A of current!"

So does this mean a load in series will always draw what it needs to comply with Ohm's law rather than preserve itself from taking on too much current? (i.e. taking the above example, "Load sees that the voltage is 30V "Uh oh, I need to take on 3A. This will destroy me but I must draw it anyway to comply with Ohm's law. So long!"?"

Best Answer

Using the water analogy, a 10 mm pipe will only allow a certain amount of water to pass, and it will depend on the applied pressure. If you double the pressure, the flow will double.

A certain material will require a certain voltage to flow a certain current. Quoting a nice answer in Physics.SE about gravitation:

Physics [Ohm's law] does not answer existential problems. It gathers data and observations and models them with mathematical equations and functions, and then can explain the data with the model and predict new observations.