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Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

RE: Your thoughts please.

Just what exactly do you want our thoughts on? My hunch is that there is just some semantic confusion going on.

Think about an electric circuit compared to a V-belt and pulleys, they are pretty good analogies. They both just provide a conduit to allow the transfer of energy spatially from where it's available to the point where you want to do work. (work as in getting hot.)

If you don't do any work at the receiving end then all that happens is that some energy is wasted by the less than perfect transfer mechanism and also some is stored in the mechanism itself in the process of it getting fired up to transfer the energy. Part of the latter is usually recovered when the system achieves a steady state or shuts down.

So let's say the V-belt connects an electric motor to a lathe. When you start the motor it revs up from nothing to it's nominal speed and during the transient interval while it's accelerating it stores energy in the mass of it's rotor, the stretch of it's V-belt and the mass of the rotating chuck and any workpiece attached to it. That's momentum for you...

Once it's all up to speed (and before you start cutting) the belt stretch is recovered and the energy stored in the rotor and head is constant and it's only drawing enough power from the line to cover friction.

For simplicity let's say that this is the '40s in New England and the circuit is DC. Naturally when you close the switch the motor has no back EMF and looks like it's DC resistance causing a large initial current to flow. Electricity can't stretch like the belt so it stores it's transient energy, it's momentum, by emitting photons which form a magnetic field around the conductor. Like the belt, as the load stabilizes they more or less snap back to the moving electrons returning most of the start-up transient.

I hope this helps a little, it's off-the-cuff so if it doesn't make sense (or it's wrong) it's my fault...

Regards, Rick


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