172
Australian woman used her BYD electric car to power her son's dialysis machine during a blackout
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
172 points (90.6% liked)
Technology
59398 readers
4685 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
By that logic a battery is a generator, since it converts chemical potential energy into electricity.
Generators, as typically understood, convert mechanical energy into electricity.
Nah it's akin to a gas tank. It isn't generating gasoline, just storing it for later use.
Depends on the level you're viewing it from.
At a high level, yes, the purpose is basically the same as a gas tank. You put something in (electricity), and take that something back out again later. Though it differs from simple physical storage in that you get slightly less back out than what you stored.
At the level of the actual physics of the component, no. Gas goes into a tank as gas, remains gas in the tank, then come back out as (the same amount of) gas. Electricity goes into a battery, is converted into chemical potential by using that electricity to move ions from one side of the battery to the other, and comes back out by reversing that reaction. There is no electricity in a battery that isn't charging or discharging.
If instead of a chemical battery it was a mechanical spring that was wound up with an electric motor, and you extracted the power by running it in reverse as a generator from the energy of the spring, is that still storing electricity? A battery is the same, just chemical instead of physical.
Except a battery is converting chemicals and using their reactions to generate electricity. Think of it more like a reservoir with a hydro plant. Your feed in electricity, the hydro plant pumps water in the tank, then during a blackout? The reservoir empties itself through the turbine, re-generating electricity. The cars battery does a similar thing. It takes electricity to change the state of the chemicals, then lets the chemicals react to generate electricity.