Eli5: How does a power bank charge a device until it dies, wouldn’t equilibrium be reached?
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If we think of voltage as height for potential energy we can use a crude analogy. Something cannot travel higher than it’s initial height on a pendulum or slope or if you bounce it off the ground. However, if you split up two bits of mass from the same height you can make one of them go higher while the other doesn’t bounce as much. The typical backyard experiment for this is dropping a tennis ball and basketball next to each other, you see they can’t return to the original height. If you drop the tennis ball place directly on top of the basketball, it will bounce to a much higher elevation. A boost convertor sort of does this with capacitors, and inductor, a diode, and a transistor. It “bounces” a little bit of electricity off of another bit to boost the voltage of some of the current, while having some loss to the remaining electricity.
If you get the water analogy of electricity the boost convertor is basically a hydraulic ram.
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