A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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.
AC motors are more powerful but also more noisy. You need that power in your kitchen mixer but you need quiet in a fan. Modern WC rooms now have a DC fan, old ones have the loud one.
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.
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.
No, skin effect only occurs on higher frequencies. That is why coaxial cabel is invented. But then they realized the energy in coax transfers in a completely different way.
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 fun to calculate that from a socket to a light bulb it may take something close to a few hours for one electron to get to the bulb, but even then that's an average. Some electrons don't even get to the light bulb ever.
IMO, the more interesting thing is how they are all always moving at a large fraction of the speed of light, but over any large distance, they are that slow.
Things never cancel each other so well on the macroscopic world.
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.
why is everyone in this thread telling me to imagine something
Because imagination is everything- probably Einstein
imagine a bicycle chain between two sprockets, if you crank it foward and back like 1 inch, over and over again, you can clearly transmit power without the chain links going much of anywhere
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.
My power company is charging me that much for nothing but vibes?!
They're giving you excitations
Elections merely facilitate the transfer the power, like (the non-leading edges of?) a drive shaft or cogs.
Even with DC you need a loop (well, a difference).
Carbon fuel one-use mentality where you burn your supply (chemically stored energy) doesn't apply, tho non-rechargeable batteries make it seem so.
It’s even crazier than that. It’s not even the electrons at the “leading edge” it’s the EM field they create even separate the of the wires that actually contain the electrons.
And the follow-up with a physical experiment after the first video started a huge drama.
God I hate that video, he explains everything so badly to the point of completely misinforming viewers. He's talking about a special situation of AC current, but uses DC in the thought experiment. He makes it seem as if the field travels to the load in a direct path and the wires don't matter. No, the EM field is completely based on the wire.
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.
It's just the one electron.... Allegedly
Can you imagine being the guy who just, like, claps his hands together and kills the electron, snuffing out all existence
The microwave doesn't heat your food, it just vibrates the water.
Heat is kinetic energy and the water is part of your food, so the microwave does heat your food.
when you touch something we never actually touch it is all just fields interacting all the way down
just the ~~tip~~ fields
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.
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 = ~~joules~~ edit: 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 (R) 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).
That movement is still energy
Build a circuit to make use of that et voilà
Friction makes heat. Same thing really