Enough to drop a grown man to the ground from just little batteries how?
In: Engineering
A taser is very low power, otherwise it would electrocute people. If you touch ground and a 20KV power line, you’re instantly dead.
The power from the batteries is pumped up to high voltage and very, very low current. This startles the subject’s nervous system, without electrocuting them. That’s the whole “less lethal” point.
A normal gun also has the power to drop a grown man to the ground with the power of less than a teaspoon of spicy sand.
Extreme voltage causes intense pain and muscle spasms. You can take the output of a battery then just pump up the voltage sky high in exchange for massively reducing the current (which is a benefit here).
The power is quite high for a fraction of a second but the average power is quite low.
What is done is the energy is stored in a capacitor or a coil and then discharged quickly with a transformer that increases the voltage.
The function is not that it delivers a lot of energy to the target. The idea is the electric pulses make the muscles of the target all contract at the same time. Your muscles are electrically controlled by your nerve, so the tase overwhelm any control you have and make all muscles contract at the same time so you can’t control them at all.
Electrical power has two main factors, voltage and amperage. A bad analogy is voltage is the speed of the bullet. Amperage is the size.
A stream of tiny bullets, like BBs will hurt like hell but won’t likely kill you. A single slug will ruin your life even traveling slowly.
You can use electronics to mess with the volts and amps by trading one for the other. Lower the amps and increase the volts. So you can take the low voltage of a battery and really juice it up by reducing the number of amps.
It’s not very powerful, it’s simply very high voltage at very low current.
Think of something like a pulley or pry-bar. Using mechanical advantage, you can move very large objects with relatively little force. But it comes at the cost of moving it a long distance.
A step-up voltage converter is a lot like a mechanical lever in the sense that it can do something like take the four batteries at 1.5 volts at 4 amp total, then converts it to like 45,000 volts with a corresponding drop in amperage down to 1/10,000th of an amp.
The high voltage is enough to mess with our muscle function, but doesn’t really care about how much electricity is flowing.
It takes these batteries and stores the power over a short amount of time then unleashes that power over a super short amount of time, so the shock you get from a tazer is not continious but short pulses . The high voltage low current explenation is not entierly true as the current is dependent on the voltage and the resistance in the body, if you have a «high voltage low current» device the voltage drops to a lower value as soon as there is a load attached.
They use a Capacitor to hold the charge until its release. A capacitor is an electronic component which is kinda like a battery, in that it can hold a bunch of eletricity within it, but unlike a battery it can discharge all that electricity in a split second.
When you denergize a transformer there’s a high voltage spike due to a collapsing magnetic field which is then captured in the capacitor for future release. So an oscillator circuit turns the transformer on and off quickly many times a second.
I think everyone talking about voltage versus amps is correct but missing a key point. Sure you need high voltage to actually get though the skin and all that. But the nervous system uses tiny amounts of energy compared to even a AA battery. So even a comparatively weak double AA is more than enough to completely short out your nervous system.
Even something like an electric eel is on the order of 1,000 times weaker than a battery.
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