Over the past couple of days, BH has been trying out her new lawnmower, with entirely satisfactory results. But we have both been rather taken aback by the amount of power packed into a plastic box about the same size as the mug in which you take your morning tea; power which can be got at by simply making a couple of contacts.
So one of this morning's reveries was to wonder what happened if one took a sledge hammer to a fully charged battery of this kind. Presumably, if one hit it hard enough it would break up, would break into bits - but what would happen to all that more or less free energy? It has to go somewhere.
Does all that electricity just whizz into the ground, eventually dissipating as heat, with the ground being a very effective sink for same?
And then, what would happen if you threw the battery into the fire?
Maybe in this case, all that electrical energy would be converted into some more or less harmless chemical combinations - but one might have thought that for this to happen quickly, there would have to be a considerable leakage of energy of one kind or another into the environment, perhaps in the form of an explosion with a good part of the energy being in the form of a shock wave?
No doubt chemists know all about this sort of thing and prepare YouTube clips so that firemen can learn about it when they are not otherwise engaged.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/new-box.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment