what are the purpose of voltage and current in a phone charger? How does it affect charging?
In: Technology
So your question is a little vague. Do you want to know how voltage and current are related and why they are?
Well I’ll try to answer the questions asked an hopefully it makes sense.
Voltage is commonly thought as the pressure or the system, and current being the number of electrons. Well if you multiply the two together you get power.
P=V*I
Where:
P=power
V=Voltage
I=current
Well for phones, the battery is generally rated for 5ish volts. I say “ish” because your battery is probably 4.2 volts, but if you apply 4.2 volts then there is a zero difference and you get no current. So really our power equation could be written
P=V(SOURCE) – V(BATTERY) * I
So if battery and source is the same, the equation equals zero and you can’t charge anything. So instead we apply 5 volts and get a 0.8v difference. Them it’s a matter of how much current flow you have. That’ll be determined by the construction of the battery itself. In this case, every battery has a certain resistance to current and that’ll determine the current flow.
At the end of the day, batteries can only have so much current at a time. Think of it like friction, if you put too mush stuff moving too fast you get a lot of heat. And heat is really the thunkg that prevents us from charging too quickly
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