• Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club
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    1 hour ago

    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.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club
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        1 minute ago

        No, the leading edge of the mechanical transfer of power - I was trying to make a faux comparison that electrons would be the inside of the shaft/cog & the fields the leading edges (that transfer the power & moving more).

        I mangled the comparison, should have given up on it. Vibes are hard to compare with anything non-vibes.

        Great youtubing in the links, that’s how you get them views (benefit several creators and spread science)!
        (*I just skimmed them for the general vibe, I’m not voicing support in case they are weird ppl, I don’t know them.)

        Edit: while speeding through I noticed a very cool simulation (software), yt/mcez0ri9yPY, these are very neat visuals.

  • LouNeko@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    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.

      • meekah@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 hour ago

        I’m far from an expert, but that’s usually just for flexibility of the cable as far as I understand. Power wires inside the walls are one thick copper wire (or rather three for live, neutral and ground)

  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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    20 minutes ago

    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 ® 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).

    • Morphit @feddit.uk
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      2 hours ago

      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.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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        11 minutes ago

        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)

  • this@sh.itjust.works
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    6 hours ago

    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.

    • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Fyi, it isnt fully correct and a lot of electricity related channels were a bit annoyed by it. But overal its a good video hehe

        • Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club
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          3 hours ago

          https://youtu.be/2Vrhk5OjBP8

          AlphaPheonix has a few amazing electricity videos including this one where he actually does the experiment.

          Veritasium’s video was so bad, like 15 channels made response videos within a week. Just search for, “is veritasium wrong about electricity”. It’s not that he was completely wrong, he was just doing lots of hand waving and making electricity sound like voodoo.

            • Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club
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              3 hours ago

              My main concern with his video was a lack of a real explanation. He never once used the word induction, for instance.

              The AlphaPhoenix video I linked proves Veritasium “true”. It wasn’t even a rebuttal, really. It’s just that he had a problem with what Veritasium was saying about current and what it means to light up a light bulb.

              Just because no one made another video after Veritasium made a follow-up one, just means everyone was tired of the subject. I have not watched Veritasium’s follow-up video because his first one offended me so much I blocked his channel. It’s not the content that was wrong, necessarily, it was the way he presented it. It was all hand waving without trying to get people to truly understand the thought experiment. It pissed me off.

              (I just edited my original comment to change rebuttal to response. Also, I removed all the other links because I haven’t watched them yet, so I can’t say anything about them.)

  • AE5NE@lemmy.radio
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    9 hours ago

    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

  • Dadifer@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    This is analogous to saying, the blades on a wind turbine don’t go anywhere, they simply spin, and yet power is created.

      • credo@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        The washing machine just spins left then right, left then right, and the clothes come out clean.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 hours ago

      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.

  • Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    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.

  • marcos@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    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.

    • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
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      12 hours ago

      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.

      • marcos@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        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.

    • Hazmatastic@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      People are really just mobile energy nets holding other energy in. What if the fields of our energy nets directly influenced each other? Jk… unless…?