What is an Electrical Generator?
Loopy
An electrical generator is a machine that generates electricity, believe it or not. A basic generator design includes insulated wire looped around a frame of some sort. Inside the frame is a magnet that is spun within the loop of wire.
Spin
One science fair design has copper wire looped around a square cardboard tube. Through the cardboard is place an axel to which is attached a magnet. The axel is spun by a crank or a drill, and as it spins, so does the magnet inside the coiled wire. The spinning magnet causes elctrons in the wire to move in a current. If you’ve ever heard anyone discuss amps, the current is what they’re talking about. Once the magnet moves 6.24 X 1018 electrons, the wire is carrying one amp worth of electricity.
Huge
Spinning a little magnet in a coil of copper wire to light up a bulb is cool and all, but it’s not going to light up New Yok City. For that, power companies buy generators from companies like General Electric, which builds them big enough to climb inside and crawl around a little bit. A General Electric generator is so big that it occupies its own railroad flat car. For some sense of the scale of the things, a little backup generator for a house puts out 20 kilowatts. A small GE generator for a power plant will put out 35 megawatts. That’s 35 million watts versus 20,000 watts.
Bigger science fair project
But the design remains about the same, although the hugeness of an industrial generator does present some engineering challenges that lead to further complication of the simple science fair design. The big generators still spin a magnet inside a coil of wire.
An electrical generator is a device that generates electricity from mechanical energy, usually via electromagnetic induction. Electromagnetic induction works by forcibly moving a loop of wire (a rotor) around a stationary bar (a stator) that provides an electric field, either through a permanent magnet or an electromagnet. By Faraday’s law, this induces a current in the rotor, which can be used to power machinery or charge batteries. Possible sources of mechanical energy include steam engines, water falling through a turbine or waterwheel, an internal combustion engine, a hand crank, a wind turbine, compressed air, solar energy, and many others. The electrical generator is the foundation of our modern electrical society. If electrical generators were to cease operating, so would most of the economy. The electrical generator was first invented by the Hungarian inventor and engineer Anyos Jedlik sometime between 1827 and 1830. Jedlik invented the generator, a simple dynamo, at least six
