I know in junkyards cranes use electricity to make a magnet powerful enough to lift a car, but could a car battery be used the same way? Could it have enough juice to lift a car? Or maybe pull one?
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Possibly you could power an electromagnet capable of pulling 120 kg or 250 pounds, but not enough for a car.
Yes and no?
To make a better magnet, you mostly just need to make it bigger. In an ideal world, once the magnet is ‘turned on’ it wouldn’t use any energy to keep it running. In practice it usually does because of inefficiencies.
A car battery can dump 100 amps at 10 volts pretty easily, although not for very long. 1000 watts. A quick google indicates that a regular junkyard magnet draws closer to 10,000 watts. So, at least for a junkyard magnet, the answer is no.
However, we could make a more efficient magnet, it would just be costly. For instance, a superconductor magnet.
To lift a car? Not sure without actually calculating it, which can be done with some basic data about the battery and electromagnet coils, but I’ll wager not strong enough by a sizable margin.
Still, a car battery can put out some pretty high current for a short time, so it would still power a decent electromagnet, until it discharges.
Depends on what you mean by “lift”. If you mean generate enough force to hold a steel object in direct contact while a cable lifts the electromagnet, that’s considerably easier than pulling the steel object to the electromagnet from a distance.
The big problem is that it will be difficult to get enough of the car close to the magnet, because the force falls off with the inverse square law. A magnet stuck to a thick steel plate will pull harder than the same magnet stuck to a thin piece of sheet metal.
You mean to hypothetically erase some incriminating information off of a laptop being held in the Albuquerque PD evidence room?
The short answer is yes, but with a ton of caveats.
* Junkyard magnets consume about 10 kilowatts (10,000 watts) continuously while in operation.
* A typical car battery outputs 12 volts, with a total of 50-60 amp hours of capacity – let’s assume 60 for this discussion. This means it could put out 12 watts of power for 60 hours, or 120 watts for 6 hours.
* There’s also a limit to how fast you can draw power from a battery since they don’t *technically* store a charge, they generate one, and the chemical reaction responsible for that power has limits as to how fast it can occur.
* Assuming you had a battery that could dump all of its capacity as fast as it needs to *and* we’re operating in a hypothetical environment with zero transmission losses, a car battery would be able to provide 10,000 watts of power for somewhere around 4-5 seconds before the battery would be completely depleted. This assumes that my math is accurate, of course, so someone could check me on that.
So with a theoretically “perfect” magnet system (which can’t exist) including a magical battery that can pump out its entire capacity near-instantaneously, you might be able to lift a car an inch off of the ground, but it wouldn’t go far. Swapping the battery out for a capacitor would solve the issue of releasing energy fast enough, but you’re still talking about a few seconds of draw.
The short answer is yes, but with a ton of caveats.
* Junkyard magnets consume about 10 kilowatts (10,000 watts) continuously while in operation.
* A typical car battery outputs 12 volts, with a total of 50-60 amp hours of capacity – let’s assume 60 for this discussion. This means it could put out 12 watts of power for 60 hours, or 120 watts for 6 hours.
* There’s also a limit to how fast you can draw power from a battery since they don’t *technically* store a charge, they generate one, and the chemical reaction responsible for that power has limits as to how fast it can occur.
* Assuming you had a battery that could dump all of its capacity as fast as it needs to *and* we’re operating in a hypothetical environment with zero transmission losses, a car battery would be able to provide 10,000 watts of power for somewhere around 4-5 seconds before the battery would be completely depleted. This assumes that my math is accurate, of course, so someone could check me on that.
So with a theoretically “perfect” magnet system (which can’t exist) including a magical battery that can pump out its entire capacity near-instantaneously, you might be able to lift a car an inch off of the ground, but it wouldn’t go far. Swapping the battery out for a capacitor would solve the issue of releasing energy fast enough, but you’re still talking about a few seconds of draw.
The short answer is yes, but with a ton of caveats.
* Junkyard magnets consume about 10 kilowatts (10,000 watts) continuously while in operation.
* A typical car battery outputs 12 volts, with a total of 50-60 amp hours of capacity – let’s assume 60 for this discussion. This means it could put out 12 watts of power for 60 hours, or 120 watts for 6 hours.
* There’s also a limit to how fast you can draw power from a battery since they don’t *technically* store a charge, they generate one, and the chemical reaction responsible for that power has limits as to how fast it can occur.
* Assuming you had a battery that could dump all of its capacity as fast as it needs to *and* we’re operating in a hypothetical environment with zero transmission losses, a car battery would be able to provide 10,000 watts of power for somewhere around 4-5 seconds before the battery would be completely depleted. This assumes that my math is accurate, of course, so someone could check me on that.
So with a theoretically “perfect” magnet system (which can’t exist) including a magical battery that can pump out its entire capacity near-instantaneously, you might be able to lift a car an inch off of the ground, but it wouldn’t go far. Swapping the battery out for a capacitor would solve the issue of releasing energy fast enough, but you’re still talking about a few seconds of draw.
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