What direction does electricity flow in a simple circuit?

Answer 1

This is a very complicated question in reality. in a simple Dc circuit (i.e. a battery driven circuit) there are 2 way's that current is talked about. the reason is historic, so here goes a very brief answer.

When people first beagn to identify how current flowed in circuits there was a school of thought that a sort of liquid flowed in electric circuits, and the driver (battery) had parts that had an excess of the liquid, and parts that had less. The bits with more were positive + and the bits with less were lacking (negative) - Naturally the liquid would try to balance the circuit, and so current was said to flow from positive to neagtive. This is referred to as conventional current.

so Conventional current is said to flow from positive to negative.

Thanks to the work of Earnest Rutherford and Niels Bohr (a student of rutherford) we now know that electric current flows as a result of electrons in the wire bumping along the wire jumping from atom to atom. This actually means that in reality current should have been flowing from negative (a surplus store of electrons) to positive (a lack of electrons) to avoid confusion, a new term was coined. Electron Flow.

so Electron Flow is from Negative to Positive.

Now to your question. How does electricity flow in a simple circuit. A Battery has 2 plates, one charged with a surplus of electrons, and one lacking electrons. When a circuit is closed, the difference in the potential of the plates (called potential difference, and measured in Volts) causes electrons to be pushed into one end of the wire at the negative terminal, while a strong pull is made on the other end of the wire by the positive terminal. The electron at the negative terminal pushes its way onto the copper atom, making it's charge unbalance, so it lets one of its electrons go, this free electron, moves on the next atom ... and so on, literally bumping electrons along the wire in the direction of pull, created by the battery. finally an electron exists the wire into the battery and one electron has been transfered to balance the battery charge.

The stronger the force (Voltage) the faster the electrons flow, this continues until the driving force (battery) is balanced (discharged) when we say the battery is flat.

Hope this makes it a bit easier to understand what is happening, even if I can't exactly answer the question But I suspect your answer should be Electron Flow in a simple electrical circuit is from Negative to positive.

Answer 2

electricity flows from positive to negative