What does Mv mean in electricity?
Content
As an electrician who teaches several students, I see many people get confused when they see the term "MV" and what it means in an electrical environment. Since it can mean several things, I will look at each of them below.
MV can stand for one of three things in electricity.
- Megavolt
- Medium voltage
- Millivolt
Below I will elaborate on the three definitions and give examples of their use.
1. Megavolt
What is Megavolt?
A megavolt, or “MV,” is the energy that a particle charged with one electron receives when it passes through a potential difference of one million volts in a vacuum.
Using megavolt
They are used in medicine for the treatment of cancer, neoplasms and tumors by external beam radiation therapy. Radiation oncologists use beams with a voltage range of 4 to 25 MV to treat cancers deep in the body. This is because these rays reach deep areas of the body well.
Megavolt X-rays are better for treating deep-seated tumors because they lose less energy than lower-energy photons and can penetrate deeper into the body with a lower skin dose.
Megavolt X-rays are also not as good for living things as orthovoltage X-rays. Because of these qualities, megavolt x-rays are usually the most common beam energy used in modern radiotherapy techniques such as IMRT.
2. Medium voltage
What is Medium Voltage?
In most cases, "medium voltage" (MV) refers to distribution systems above 1 kV and typically up to 52 kV. For technical and economic reasons, the operating voltage of medium voltage distribution networks rarely exceeds 35 kV.
Use of medium voltage
Medium voltage has many uses and the number is only going to grow. In the past, medium voltage class voltages were mainly used for secondary transmission and primary distribution.
Medium voltage is often used to power distribution transformers that step down medium voltage to low voltage to power equipment at the end of the line. In addition, it is widely used in the industry for motors with a voltage of 13800V or less.
But new system topologies and semiconductors have made it possible to use power electronics in medium voltage networks. In addition, new distribution networks are built around medium voltage AC or DC to make room for new energy sources and users.
3. Millivolts
What is millivolts?
Millivolt is a unit of electrical potential and electromotive force in the International System of Units (SI). Millivolt is written as mV.
The base unit of millivolts is the volt, and the prefix is "milli". The prefix milli comes from the Latin word for "thousand". Written as m. Milli is a factor of one thousandth (1/1000), so one volt equals 1,000 millivolts.
Millivolt usage
Millivolts (mV) are units used to measure voltage in electronic circuits. It is equal to 1/1,000 volts or 0.001 volts. This unit was coined to facilitate simpler measurements and reduce confusion among students. Therefore, this block is not commonly used in the field of electronics.
A millivolt is a thousandth of a volt. It is used to measure very small voltages. This can be very useful when creating electrical circuits where tiny voltages would be too difficult to measure.
Summing up
Electricity is a complex and ever-changing field. I hope this article has helped answer any questions about what Mv stands for in electricity.
Take a look at some of our articles below.
- Three Warning Signs of Electrical Circuit Overload
- How to measure DC voltage with a multimeter
- How to test a low voltage transformer
