We recently had a transformer blow in our neighborhood and now my 3 year old is asking me how it works and I honestly don’t know. Can anyone electrical transformers?
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To understand what they do, you need to understand the electricity grid. High-voltage lines are like slow, steady rivers carrying lots of water, while your home power supply is like a narrow creek.
A transformer takes a big stream and transforms this into narrow streams supplying the entire neighborhood.
But that’s just *what* they do. *How* they work a pretty genius application of electromagnetism and AC current, explaining that is basically impossible if you don’t know how what a magnetic field or electric current is.
Basically, the AC current is like a swing, going back and forth. High-voltage lines swing really high, but with the magic of electromagnets you can “attach” a second swing that swings at the same rate (all power lines in the US swing at 50 times/second), but with much less intensity. This is your 120V end-user power supply).
To do so, you let current flow through a coil, and have a seperate cable mixed into this coil (ie two coils in one). The swinging in one coil creates a magnetic field, which creates swinging in the second coil. But since the second coil is less tightly wound, it swings less intensely there, thanks to ✨electromagnetism✨
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