This is analogous to saying, the blades on a wind turbine don’t go anywhere, they simply spin, and yet power is created.
You’re just wiggling the saw back and forth, yet the log is eventually halved
The washing machine just spins left then right, left then right, and the clothes come out clean.
Ad on a DC system, the electrons move dozens of times slower than a person walking. They also don’t get anywhere, and power is still delivered.
It’s kind of shocking, after a lifetime of assuming electrons whiz through wires at the speed of light, to find out they move so slowly that the speed at which they move is referred to as “electron drift.”
Guess I’m in today’s lucky 10000
In an AC system, the pedastal fan in your bedroom is electromagnetically coupled to the turbine at the coal/gas/hydro/nuc power station. They instantly and directly influence each other, and they both are spinning in tandem like two wheels on a car connected by an axel. Slowing the rotation of the fan with your hand technically increases the torque of the turbine, if only by an immeasurably small amount.
Fun Fact: An improperly shielded (or old and deteriorating) fan can be influenced by stray electromagnetic radiation. They’ll pick up AM radio signals occasionally, creating an off tone in the fan noise that sounds like a person talking faintly on the other side of the fan.
Whats crazier is that in direct current individual electrons don’t travel at the speed of light through the conductor, but only at roughly 1cm/s.
Or, that thanks to the “skin effect” the current actualy travels in a very thin layer below the outside surface of cconductor. Most of the conductor doesn’t transfer power but only maintains the magnetic field to keep the current flowing.
That’s why you don’t have one thick copper cable but multiple thin ones.
The balls in the middle of newtons cradle don’t move either.
Newton’s cradle sounds like a kinky sex move, which is ironic since Newton was likely a virgin.
Yeah. Sort of like holding two ends of a chain and dragging it back and forth. Even if the chain isn’t traveling the full length, it’s still moving and you could still extract power from the system if you attached something to the middle of the chain.
why is everyone in this thread telling me to imagine something
So imagine a bus…
Does it leave every 21 frames?
Steam engine pistons also move back and forth less than a meter at a time, and still could push trains a million kilometers in the forward direction. It’s that they’re pushing right while moving right and left when moving left. That’s like when AC current and voltage are in phase, delivering positive net power. Meanwhile, something that pulls left when moving right is consuming power.
It’s just the one electron… Allegedly
Mum says it’s my turn to use the electron!
Can you imagine being the guy who just, like, claps his hands together and kills the electron, snuffing out all existence
The voltage(electrical equivalent of force) is what travels.
It’s analagous to pushing something away from you with a really really really long stick, then pulling it back again. The stick didn’t move much but you still affected something far away.
That movement is still energy
Build a circuit to make use of that et voilà
Friction makes heat. Same thing really
Imagine an old-timey saw with a lumberjack on each side, pulling it back and forth across the tree. The saw just goes back and forth, but effective work gets done.
The electrons don’t move very quickly either. Like, a sluggish one millimeter per second is more current density than most metal conductors can handle without melting. Thankfully, there’s lots of mobile electrons carrying charge (coulombs) so that’s a lot of current. “Electricity” only travels near the speed of light because voltage is like a force sending waves through the electric field (simplified). And it’s instantaneous current (amps =
joulesedit: coulombs / second) times voltage (electric field potential difference in volts = joules per coulomb) that delivers power.Simplifying to a single harmonic (pure 50Hz/60Hz sine voltage source and a passive, linear RLC load), you need not only multiply the voltage’s and current’s effective amplitude (that gets you apparent power in VA, voltamps) but also their power factor or cos φ (the cosine of phase beetween them) to get power in W (joules per second). If the cosine is one, it’s a purely resistive ® load (like a heater) with a phase difference of 0°. If the PF is zero, it’s a purely reactive (L/C) load (a freewheeling synchronous motor is much like that) with a current phase of ∓90° and no power is consumed overall. If the cosine is negative, power is actually being generated by the device you’re measuring (for instance, old elevators and escalators with synchronous motors are actually delivering power into mains when enough people are travelling down).
Amps are not joules / second;- that would be Watts. Amps = Coulombs / second, and Volts = Joules / Coulomb. That’s why multiplying them gives you power in Watts.
That’s true instantaneously but as you say, if the current or voltage are alternating then you can’t just use the AC current and voltage to get real power like you can with DC.
You are correct, that was a mistake.
However, although symbols of units named after scientists (V, A, W, C, J, Ω, H, F, T, Hz, S, K, N, Pa, Bq, R, Ci) are uppercase, they are lowercase when written out (volt, amp(ère), watt, coulomb, joule, ohm, henry, farad, tesla, hertz, siemens, kelvin, newton, pascal, becquerel, roentgen, curie) to differentiate them from the surnames. Also be careful with degrees (Celsius, Fahrenheit, Rankine, Réaumur…) and grams (g, not G or gr), unrelated to the bacteria-ranking Christian Gram. And yes, the l/L debate is why the Claude Litre hoax was created. (In Unicode-capable applications I use 𝑙 BTW)
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In an tidal earth system, the water doesn’t even go anywhere, it simply vibrates back and forth
Kind of like how a piston in an engine also kinda just “shakes about” (because of explosions or steam or whatever) and yet delivers a lot of power.
So you’re admitting that AI data centers vibe pretty hard? Your words!
Technically, computers are running on DC. The PSU is fed by AC but its sole purpose is to convert all the power the computer needs to DC. It’s possible to only use DC to power computers and it’s probably/apparently more efficient.
