If electricity can be used to create a magnet/electromagnet, why can’t a magnet be used to create electricity without it moving?

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If electricity can be used to create a magnet/electromagnet, why can’t a magnet be used to create electricity without it moving?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It can! But it destroys the magnet.

When electricity flows through a coil to form an electromagnet, the coil resists the electricity, and that means that the electrical energy must go somewhere. As it happens, that electrical energy goes into the magnetic field. When we remove the battery, the electricity continues flowing for a split second, as the magnetic field collapsing returns its energy to us in the form of electricity.

When creating permanent magnets, we basically freeze some of the magnetic field inside of the magnetic material. If we put it inside of a coil of wire and heated it until it demagnetized, it would return its energy in the form of electricity to the coil.

But this destroys the magnet, and to make it magnetic again we’d have to do the same process over, so we have to put the energy back into the magnet – all this does is store some energy in the magnet.

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