Loading Effects of Instruments

In the previous section (Internal resistance of voltage sources), we learned that power supplies are not the ideal instruments we may have thought they were. The applied load can have an effect on the terminal voltage. Fortunately, since today's supplies have such small load regulation factors, the change in terminal voltage with load can usually be ignored for most applications. If we now turn our attention to the various meters we use in the lab, we again find that they are not totally ideal: For instance, The resistance between the terminals of an ammeter is determined by the chosen scale of the ammeter. In general, In Fig. 1(a), the ammeter scale is $2mA$, which means the maximum current flow through ammeter should not exceed $2mA.$ while Fig. 1(b), shows the ammeter with scale $2A$, which is far higher than $2mA$ scale. The $2mA$ scale ammeter series resistance must be high e.g $250Ω$ enough to resist the current flow in the meter circuit to limit the value upto $2mA$ current . While the $2A$ scale ammeter series resistor must be small enough e.g $1.5Ω$ to prevent current flow in the meter circuit up to $2A$ current. In the ideal situation of ammeter connection to the circuit, we ignore the internal resistance of the circuit inside ammeter instrument due to low internal series resistance.

How does ammeter effect circuit analysis?

In the Fig. 2(a), the ideal consideration of ammeter does not have any effect on the current flow in the series circuit. while in Fig. 2(b), the internal resistance $250Ω$ is summed with the load resistors and the result is shown as: For example, in Fig. 2(a), for an ideal ammeter, the current displayed is $0.6 mA$ as determined from If we now insert a meter with an internal resistance of $250 Ω$ as shown in Fig. 2(b), the additional resistance in the circuit will drop the current to $0.593 mA$ as determined from Now, certainly the current has dropped from the ideal level, but the difference in results is only about 1% - nothing major, and the measurement can be used for most purposes. If the series resistors were in the same range as the $250 Ω$ resistors, we would have a different problem, and we would have to look at the results very carefully.