Why do human electricity generation so focused on efficently boiling water and turning a turbine with it. do we have other ways of generating electricity every power plant i know (coal gas nuclear) does the turbine method ? And why is boiling water and turning a turbine with it so great ?
In: Physics
Well I haven’t poked through every single comment here but after looking at a few one thing hadn’t come up yet — why we’re insistent on turning turbines.
That comes down to the way our power grid is set up, and the method we use to generate electricity. Let’s start with the generation first, a common and long-understood method is to have a moving magnetic field next to a conductor. The moving magnetic field produces power in the conductor. For this, it’s much more sensible to make it a rotating assembly rather than some infinitely long linear assembly.
The second is our power grid. Power is distributed as 3-phase, with each phase 120 degrees out of phase with each other. This further invites the idea of a rotating generator, where the generating coils can be placed 120 degrees apart from each other to accomplish that.
Then comes how to rotate this assembly, since it’s pretty clear that having a generator where something spins is the way to go. If we’re burning coal, how would we turn that heat into rotating motion? The same with nuclear power, it creates massive amounts of heat, how best to turn air or water that’s not really hot into rotating motion? In comes the steam turbine. In the case of a nuclear plant, it handily produces power while at the same time keeping the reactor cool enough to not melt itself apart as well.
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