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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Converting between voltages is done by turning electrical energy into a different kind of energy, and then back.
The first way that came to mind for me when I was young was a motor and a generator connected together. The electricity into the motor becomes turning in the shaft, and then that becomes electricity in the other motor. By adding more or fewer coils to the generator, we can adjust the voltage that comes out, since the voltage from each coil adds together.
I was overcomplicating things, though. See, a motor actually turns electrical energy into magnetic energy, then the magnetism pulls on the shaft. We can skip the middleman and take the shaft out, having the motor’s electromagnets right by the generator’s electromagnets.
That’s all a transformer is. Two sets of coils, one input and one output, right next to eachother. The first coil generates a magnetic field from the electricity, and the second one picks it up turning it back into electricity. By adjusting how many loops is in each coil, we control the voltage that comes out.
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