I know that electrons are basically the way electronics work on a basic level, “current! and magic?”
But I dunno what that means. Which probably is a good reason why I don’t know the answer of my question. Here we go:
When a generator makes power (which I think means it sends electrons down a line?) The electrons that the generator shoves down the pipe gotta come from somewhere right? Do they just manifest? It’s called a generator for a reason?
Electrons are a part of atoms right? So one would assume those pieces of an atom have got to be replaced? Or made. Or surely itll be some freakish atom eventually with 0 electrons and 82 neutrons and protons. Probably giving folks cancer.
In: 2
Electrons are influenced by magnets, one side of the magnet repels electrons while the other side attracts them. When move a magnet down a closed loop of wire you will cause them to flow inside that loop creating a current. The number of electrons in there stay the same, they’re just moving from one end to another.
The reason we make wires out of metals is that the electrons and atoms in metal is very loosely coupled together. In metals there are plenty of free electrons which does not belong to any single atom but rather move around between the atoms freely. So you can sometimes get atoms with negative charge and sometimes with positive charge. But in general current will flow from positive to negative to even out the charges.
What a generator is doing is to force the charge to flow from negative to positive within the generator. This requires power. So you end up with two wires to a generator, one positively charged and one negatively charged. You can then connect these two wires to an electrical load to allow the charge a place to flow and it will force its way through the resistance in the load.
This is why the power plug in the generator have two prongs in addition to the ground. One prong for each direction of current flow. However it does not matter which is which since the current changes direction several times a second.
Imagine water in a fully enclosed pipe system. Say you had a long tube in a circle. The water in that pipe can move, but unless something moves it, it’s not really gonna go anywhere. Let’s attach a pump to that pipe. The pump will move the water around the system. It’s pushing the water in a direction now. We’ve got motion. Let’s put a water mill on the pipe system. The pump is pushing water around, and that motion is now spinning the water mill. That all makes sense, right? The water is moving because we’re pushing it, and the moving water is moving the mill. We’re making use of the water’s movement to do something.
Now let’s apply it to electronics.
Instead of a pipe, it’s a cable. Instead of water, it’s electrons. Conductive metals have electrons that can move about if given energy, so they act like the water in our analogy. Instead of our pump, we have our generator. The generator converts other forms of energy (combustion, motion) into electrical charge that gives those electrons in the cable energy to move. They move in one direction because of magnetic fields, but that’s not important. Just know that just like the previous example, we’re pushing the electrons along the cable like we pushed the water along the pipe. Now, instead of a water mill, we can use any electrical device. The energy has been pushed towards the device, powering it. We’re making use of the charged electron’s movement to do something.
The electrons aren’t in the atoms that make up the matter of the cable, they effectively orbit the proton/neutron clusters, so there’s not atomic changing. A copper cable never changes from being a copper cable, it just carries charges along it. There’s no change in the total number of electrons, they’re moving from one copper atom to another, taking the place of the one that was there previously.
No energy is created or destroyed, merely converted from something, into electricity, into something else.
The electrons don’t really get shoved down the pipe much, they mainly just move back and forth in place.
The key point that is perhaps missing from the other (excellent) explanations is that your electrical circuit has to form a loop. If you imagine the generator pushing electrons in one direction then they go into one end of the loop, and that pushes other electrons out of the other end of the loop into the generator. So electrons aren’t created or destroyed by the generator, it just moves electrons which already exist around.
This is why a plug has two main prongs: a supply and a return, typically called live and neutral.
For a generator to actually make power a closed circuit is required. The generator thus takes electrons from the negative terminal and releases them in the positive terminal, always keeping the overall electron balance and making it cancer-free
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