And does it eventually break it completely?
In: Engineering
Ac motors accept “pulsing” or on/off current by orienting magnets that get energized according to the alternating current. In the simplest terms possible, a direct current (dc) would just put constant current into the nearest magnet in the motor and instead of turning the motor it would expend its energy into heat without expelling any energy spinning the motor.
You are asking for a base level course on electric motor design. I suspect there are lots of courses/tutorials on Youtube to help, but this isn’t the place for that level of detail.
Go and watch the How Motors Work For Beginners by Jeremy Fielding series on youtube for a full explaination, even if you’re five.
It depends.
If you feed 1 Volt of AC into a 400 Volt DC motor, nothing would happen. If you feed 1000 V of AC into a 1 V AC or DC motor, it will turn into a space heater.
Any device that is designed to accept AC or DC can withstand a certain amount of the other one. For some, this means they can take as many Volts of the wrong one as they would take of the right one to work; for others, even small amounts can kill them.
For many DC motors, getting AC means that they will try to switch between running forward and backwards 60 times a second. Some motors can handle that; some can’t. (Imagine someone forcing you to shake your head 60 times a second!)
For an AC motor, getting DC means that it will be missing the part that makes it go on rotating instead of just moving a tiny bit. So it will try to move that tiny bit and will keep trying to stay there very hard. And all that energy will be used to make heat instead of movement. (Oversimplification warning: there are multiple very different types of AC motors)
For electronics, getting AC means that half of the time, the current will try to run in the wrong direction. There are components that simply block the current, and others blow up when it comes the wrong way.
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