I believe my understanding of electric currents is flawed and want some help to clear up a few things. I'm not looking for a precise scientific understanding, but to understand the basics. I'll try to explain my understanding instead of asking a bunch of questions but if I should boil this down to one question only, that would be how the energy is transferred from the battery through the electrons and into heat making the lightbulb glow? I know the explanation below is very simplified, but is it simply wrong? (English is not my first language)
Let's think of a simple circuit consisting of a battery, conductors and a light bulb. I know batteries are very varied, but to simplify a lot we can think of the minus-pole of the battery consisting of electrons being "released" into the conductors, this causing the voltage drop to occur. This causes the electrons in the whole network to bounce into each other, repel each other and being "driven" towards the plus-pole, I guess both because of negative electrons repelling each other and later them being attracted to the positive particles in the plus-pole. The energy, which makes the lightbulb glow, is the kinetic energy of the electrons, started by the battery introducing the voltage. This energy will be transferred to heat (at least in older lightbulbs (because of resistance in the thin wire in the bulb?)) causing the lightbulb to glow.
Best Answer
The battery is an energy source that supplies the electrical energy to the electrons in the conductors. There is no actual flow of electrons. It's the energy that is transferred. A conductor contains large no. of atoms tightly packed with plenty of availability of valence electrons that are ready to move out from the atom if you supply a little bit of energy. Once the energy is provided from a battery, the electrons accepting that energy get accelerated because of that field. But it's velocity will get averaged due to increased amount of collisions with the atoms. So the resulting velocity get averaged. If it;s the flow of electrons that make the bulb glow, then due to the average velocity of the electrons, it take a finite time to make the bulb glow after the switch is on. But in reality things happen in a different way. Switching on and the glowing of bulb happens at the same instant. So, the principle is something different. The electrons accepting the energy will move forward and come in the vicinity of another electron. This increases the potential energy of the system. The second electron transfers this potential energy into kinetic energy and move forward. So there is electron movement. But the electrons are just carriers of energy. They just transfer the energy from electron to electron. Now a bulb has some resistance. So the electrons will lose some energy there which appears as heat and makes the filament glow.