How does a generator transforms gasoline into electricity?
In: Technology
Imagine the engine of a car. It turns gasoline into a rotary movement, which can be applied to the wheels and to drive the car forward.
Now imagine that instead of the wheels you connect the gasoline engine to a generator. The gasoline engine now turns the generator which in turn generates electricity.
What is a generator you ask? Well, imagine an electric engine. The electric engine normally takes electricity to create a magnetic field in different electric coils (wires wrapped around a metal core). The electric engine also has fixed magnets inside. The magnetfield of the coils now attract or repell the magnets and again a rotary motion is generated.
The same setup can be used the other way around. Instead of applying electricity to the motor you can manually rotate the magnets. Now as the magnets rotate past the electric coils the magnetic field of the magnets induce electricity in the electric coils.
Edit: Spelling 🙂
A generator is basically an engine like you see in a car. The gasoline is combusted/exploded in a controlled and frequent manner that causes motion in the cylinders. The cylinders are attached by some mechanism to something that spins. Where a car transfers this spinning motion to a wheel , the generator basically uses then opposite of an electric motor to create an electric current. One major property of electricity and magnetism is if you have a magnet (or several) moving continuously near a wire (the exact conditions are a bit more complex) a continuous electric current will be produced.
You know how an electric motor can turn electricity into physical motion, by generating magnetic fields that push against each other? That physics also works backwards, with the gasoline engine spinning either copper coils or magnets, that will induce an electric current.
Through the same way a car uses gasoline to create torque, a generator uses that torque to spin a an electric generator. That last device is basically a spinning magnet that passes by a copper coil and generates charge.
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