What are Electric Transformers?

Question

the things on power lines. we recently had two power outages, and it was because the “transformer blew up”. what does that mean exactly?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

All conductors have some amount of resistance, even copper. That resistance means that a small amount of the current flowing through the conductor will be lost as heat. Transformers are designed to deal with some amount of heat but obviously have a limit. Once that limit is reached the transformer can fail, sometimes dramatically.