Why is water so damaging to electrical and electronic goods?
In: Engineering
Regular impure water is conductive. Many components in a circuit board are layed out specifically so that electric current won’t pass through them.
It makes things that are not suppose to be conductive, conductive.
>Why is water so damaging to electrical and electronic goods?
Electronics rely on running **exactly** the right ranges of voltages over **exactly** the right components.
Impure water has limited conductive ability, so of you pour it over the precisely interconnected components then suddenly everything is connected to everything out of a sudden. Worst case scenario a wire or trace gets hit with a current that it wasn’t designed to bear and simply *evaporates*, damaging the board beyond repay..
Water (impure) can be a conductor so that has some immediate problems for circuits with exposed conductors (like a lot of electronics). Modern electronics, in particular, are designed to be very small and therefore adjacent conductors are very close to each other. It is also designed to work with very small signals meaning any leakage current will have a big impact. (This is why you can leave big exposed conductors like power lines in the rain and they don’t have issues)
Water is also a very good solvent – meaning it takes stuff from one place and gets it to others. This is generally not a good thing.
Water tends to make chemical reactions go faster (because it dissolves things and allows molecules, atoms to interact more freely). Most of the time, you don’t want that. Things like oxidization and corrosion degrade both mechanical and electrical properties.
Bit of a dick answer for an ELI5, but it’s not….
Pure water isn’t very conductive, so doesn’t bother electronics much.
Normal water, which has all kinds of impurities conducts electricity fantastically.
If your device is turned off, and the battery removed. Water isn’t going to cause any immediate problems. Dry it off before you add power. Rusting might cause issues later but it will probably be fine.
The problems come when you have electricity and a conductive liquid, like impure water.
Instead of electricity flowing where it’s supposed to, the water bridges gaps, and the electricity flows wherever it wants to, causing short circuits.
It doesn’t need to be liquid, you can imagine the damage you might cause if you opened up your PC, and wired the power supply directly into the CPU or RAM. Water is doing much the same thing inside your devices, but not so obvious, and with the side effect of extinguishing any small fires it may start.
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