Saturday 9 April 2016

Flux and Electromagnetism

The concept of flux in Elecromagnetics may be more than 150 years old. What does it mean really. The use of electric flux and magnetic flux is pervasive. Has the meaning changed over the last century. It could be that the founders of electrostatics were thinking a lot more about the particulars of what was going on then we do today. Maybe today we take certain sets of equations for granted and plow through formulas with multi-processor computers using method of moments to gather a solved 3D field.

When the idea of vector field flux was applied to electromagnetics chemistry was still nascent. I'm not certain our fore-bearers had a solid concept of the lattice structure of many metals or a statistical model of the electron voltage vs the positron voltage. Maybe these people were doing what they had to to get published. Regardless the concept of flux remains with respect to electric fields and magnetic fields.

Electric fields - magnetic fields? But fields of what. Well we know there are an abundance of elementary particles out there. Electrons just have to dance in the right way and we will see field like effects because there are so many of them and they move so fast.

The fast movement of electrons in a conductor seem to have effects that stretch far from the conductor itself. The dielectric region beyond the conductor exhibits or contains the flux as it changes in the presence of a surplus or deficit of electrons.

In the case of an antenna this alternating surplus or deficit of electrons that propagates kilometers or mega-meters from the antennas location. There are trillions of electrons located in small bits of atmosphere. It's a hard to conceive of just how may electrons surround an antenna. The chemistry of antenna's could be said to be a statistical marvel.

Electrons at boundaries behave in particular manner. Electrons deep inside a conductor behave in another way all together. Perhaps that is a topic best described in another post.

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