The Biot-Savart law is a physical law with applications in both Electromagnetism and
aerodynamics. As originally formulated, the law describes the magnetic field set up by a steady
current density. More recently, by a simple analogy between magnetostatics and fluid dynamics,
the same law has been used to calculate the velocity of air induced by vortex lines in aerodynamic
systems.
The Biot-Savart law is fundamental to magnetostatics just as Coulomb’s law is to electrostatics.
The Biot-Savart law follows from and is fully consistent with Ampère’s law, much as Coulomb’s
law follows from Gauss’ Law.
In particular, if we define a differential element of current
then the corresponding differential element of magnetic field is
where
I is the current, measured in amperes
r is the unit displacement vector from the element to the field point and the integral is over the
current distribution
Examples
References
[2] Jackson, D. ”Classical Electrodynamics”, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1975.
This entry is a derivative of the Biot-Savart law article from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
Authors of the orginial article include: Salsb, Tim Starling, Metacomet, JabberWok and Toby
Bartels. History page of the original is here
