It has always been a question of mine that ive never gotten answered in a way that I understand. Like, how do you go from motion in my generator to electricity for my toaster? how does the energy go from spinny-magnet in the box outside to lightning in my walls? I don’t understand.
In: 87
Electromagnetic induction.
Motor spins, disrupts electrons using magnets, converting mechanical energy into electrical energy and pushing the electricity through. A little bit like a pump for electrons?
Spinny magnet sets up a field that induces a chain reaction of electric fields along the wire going into your house.
This transformation from kinetic to electrical energy carries right through the wires looking for somewhere to complete a circuit so a current can be induced. Toaster is plugged in and turned on and wham! Instant circuit with a tiny bit of it being along wires that can’t quite handle all the current, so the excess energy is shed as heat and light.
Electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin called electromagnetism. So they can affect one another.
A spinning magnet can sort of “push” electrons in nearby wires, creating a current and therefore generating electricity.
Conversely, an electric current can “push” a magnet. That’s how we can turn electricity back into spinning in electric motors.
Have you ever sat in a bathtub full of water and swoosh back and forth? The water sloshes all about back and forth.
In the wire that’s coiled around the magnet, the water could be thought of as electrons and the magnet as your body.
The magnet swooshes back and forth, which creates an electric field (a bathtub full of water), and with that swooshing electric field, the electrons then move.
Just like a river of water turning a wheel, that turning wheel can now be setup with a series of gears and things to drive a hammer or a grain mill.
Electronics are made in a way to capitalize on the flow of electrons, rather than water. Afterall, electrons are orders of magnitude smaller than a flowing river.
Basically, we convert motion to motion elsewhere; electricity is just on a very small scale.
A bunch of kids stand in a long line. If I bring a gross bug near one of them, that kid tries to move away from it which pushes the next kid forward, who in turn pushes the next and so on. At the end of the line the last kid falls over and screams.
Moving a magnet near a wire (bug near kid) causes electricity to move down the wire (kids pushing each other). I don’t get this for free because I have to move the bug which takes energy. Make the wire (line of kids) long enough and you can move energy a long distance.
Just like pushing more kids over at the end of the line makes the screaming louder, the more electricity you push through a thin wire the more heat and light it makes, so you can make toasters and old incandescent light bulbs work.
This is a gross (pun intended) oversimplification and the analogy is not technically correct, but I hope it gets the point across.
There is a lot of misconception about how power flows through power lines due to the incorrect teaching that elections flow down a power line. Give these videos a view, they explain the use of electricity and magnetism together get power working.
Part 1 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY
Part 2 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI_X2cMHNe0
Nichrome wire heats up nicely when you apply a current. Careful with it though as it’s easy to accidentally start a fire with it.
ELI5
Electricity is transmitted with electons inside wires. The spinny metal thing in the generator tugs on the electrons in a specific way to create electricity. That transported trough wires to your home and into your toaster.
Your toaster is designed when electricity is flowing, the same tugging of the generator, the heating element heats up.
This is the most basic explanation.
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ELI10
There are a few more steps between the power plant and your toaster. The generator is huge the toaster is little, if you would put your toaster directly on the generator it would burn out.
Transformers (not optimus prime) used to distribute the tugs and make them bigger or smaller. 2 coil of wires put in a certain way and with certain number of coilings make the tugs smaller
Big ones are connected to the HUGE wires from the power plant and a smaller one to the region, a smaller one to a city and a smaller one to your street and into your home.
The heating element in your toaster reduces the tugs because the work they do, that is why a generator needs fuel so the tugs can be put back to a certain level. so everyone can get some energy from them
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This is extremely oversimplified, but it need to be done without going into details like electromagnetism, voltage and amperage.
In many metals there are some electrons that can freely move around inside the material, these electrons are free to be manipulated. All electrons are like very tiny magnets that always repel each other, so if they are bunched up inside a piece of metal, let’s say on one side of the wire, they will try to evenly space out.
|■■■■■■■■■■■■■————|
↓
|■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■|
now for the generator, imagine a single wire connected from your toaster to a generator:
🍞 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ⚡
To generate the heat in the toaster, you need to make the electrons move inside the toaster since the electrons generate “friction” inside the toaster which heats it up. So moving the electrons back and forth inside the toaster is your goal.
You can do that by moving some electrons at one end of the cable back and forth (the generator), because all the electrons repel each other evenly they all start to move to get back to being evenly spaced.
🍞 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ → ■ ⚡
🍞 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ → ■ ■ ⚡
…
🍞 → ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ⚡
and finally the electrons in the toaster move as well, this entire chain of movement happens at the speed of light.
So all that you need to do to create electricity is moving the electrons back and forth at one end of the cable and the rest will wiggle along to that generator. That wiggling motion generates the power needed in appliances.
Electric power comes from the flow of electrons through a wire. If you want to create flow, you can either make a battery, or you can INDUCE flow with magnets. Electrons have electric fields around them just like magnets have magnetic fields, and these two types of field interact.
The actual math behind this interaction is quite complicated but it can be roughly summarized as: “motion in one field creates perpendicular motion in the other field.” The effect of this is if you spin magnets around a metal wire, they induce an electric current through that wire. The opposite is also true: if you “spin” electrons around a metal rod by coiling a wire around it, it creates a temporary magnet (called an electromagnet).
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