Title text:
‘This HAZMAT container contains radioactive material with activity of one becquerel.’ ‘So, like, a single banana slice?’
Transcript:
[Cueball holds a stick while talking with Megan and White Hat.]
Cueball: This stick is one meter long.
Megan: Cool.
White Hat: That’s a nice stick.[Cueball holds a smallish rock.]
Cueball: This rock weighs one pound.
Megan: I’d believe it.
White Hat: Looks like a normal rock.[Cueball holds a small battery.]
Cueball: This battery is one volt.
Megan: Seems fine.
White Hat: Might need a recharge.[Cueball holds a capacitor while Megan and White Hat panic.]
Cueball: This capacitor is one farad.
Megan: Aaaaa! Be careful!!
White Hat: Put it down!!
Source: https://xkcd.com/3106/
Depends on the voltage it’s charged with, but household current would give it more energy than a shotgun has.
Realistically one would not do that unless you were dealing with something industrial. You would use them otherwise for things like dampening lower voltage systems that need a lot of current.
Closer to the danger level of someone holding two exposed wires plugged into the wall.
Would that not leak a ton to the environment? Parasitic capacitance or smth. I ain’t not voltager.
If we’re getting into practical realities it would probably pop and smolder long before it got fully charged. Capacitance is how much charge something will hold per volt. Doesn’t say anything about how much charge it holds before catching on fire. :)
As long as the voltage is high enough, it does not need a whole Farad to wreck havoc. One of the first pranks they played on me in the lab was the “hey, catch” thing with a large, charged capacitor. Yes, I caught it. And I regretted it soon afterwards.
Household current pumped through a full bridge rectifier, that is.
Capacitors don’t seem to do very much with AC Other than attenuate it a bit
Technically correct. The best kind of correct. :)
I basically solved for shotgun, confirmed in was in the ~100V range and disregarded every other consideration for actually doing it.
I’m pretty sure most hand sized capacitors would just pop if you actually tried to put that much in them.
Read in electroboom’s voice: FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER!!!
Actually, they act like a short circuit to high-frequency AC, so it is more like “blow up” (in general case).
Fun thing. Cheap aluminium capacitors do blow up, when you plug them in the wrong way.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/53kl5kNJ728
Well by attenuate it a bit you mean they pretty much filter ac out if you have the right capacitance and resistance values as capacitors act like low pass filters.
Capacitors can be used to remove ripple from a DC current. Ripple is basically alternating current that is running along a DC current. So, attenuation, I believe, is the correct terminology.
They generally don’t completely get rid of AC, and they don’t perfectly filter it out unless they are perfectly matched for the AC, and even then, I don’t know of any capacitors that are used in lieu of a full-bridge rectifier or half-bridge rectifier to convert AC to DC.
I could very well be wrong. I am far from an electronics expert, But this is what my understanding tells me.
Well youre not far off. They are used to filter ac, not convert it. They act as low-pass filters which means if you have a setup which is a 100khz low-pass filter it means it only lets through frequencies that are under 100khz. There are of course more accurate but complicated ways of explaining this but that is out of scope for this comment. Also nothing is perfect in the real world but you can calculate how much of the signal it lets through.
Shouldn’t that be “noise” instead of “signal”?
I mean depends on the context, in the specific case which i was thinking of it is signal but usually its noise. I have mainly worked with ac and dc signal coupling so thats why both sre signals for me when i think if it.
That makes sense. In distortions for music instruments all of it is signal for instance. It’s just that sometimes you don’t want all of it because you want a specific sound to be produced.
I’m most used to working with digital electronics with a crystal supplying the frequency, so for me anything that is above that frequency is noise.
AC units have beefy capacitors, right? Do you know in what range, for comparison?
If by AC you mean air conditioner, I just replaced mine with a 50+5uF dual cap @ 370/440 VAC
Still tens to maybe low hundreds of microfarads.
Oh. I thought it would be more impressive, but that’s still orders of magnitude away. Thanks!
And when they are used for air-conditioning units, they are typically boost capacitors, which means they store up a nice amount of juice for when the compressor powers on and needs a sudden rush of energy, but that’s only a very small amount, like you couldn’t crank a car with the amount of energy in these capacitors.