I have been wondering this for a while now, and haven’t really found any answers that I understood. The way I think of it is that when you measure voltage from line to neutral you are kind of measuring “halfways from” the winding of L1 (where you only measure over one winding) to the shared point of the other phases instead of when you measure from line to line and you measure over both the windings in between them.
Tl;dr In a 230V distribution, why does measuring from line to line give 230V but line to neutral gives 120-130? And why the magical number sqr(3)? In my mind it should be 0.5 .. :p
Bonus question: Does anyone have a physical picture of how the transformer is connected to the consumer? I have seen the diagram, but I’m wondering what the cabling looks like in real life
In: 2
With split phase power, it’s like having two points on the edge of a circle opposite each other going around the circle, with neutral in the middle. With three phase power, you have three points on the circle in a triangle, so when one is at at zero degrees, going around the circle the sine of 120 degrees is sqrt(3)/2, and the sine of of 240 degrees is – sqrt(3)/2.
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