What Does An Electric Charger Do?
A typical car charger takes 12V car batteries and can power an electric car for about 70 miles on a single charge.
A typical phone charger takes a DC input at 5V and outputs 5V.
A typical laptop charger takes a DC input at 12V and outputs 5V.
How do they work?
Basically, you hook up one lead from your car battery to a DC charger and one lead to the load (laptop, phone, or whatever) and the charger will use the current flowing between the battery and the load to do some work.
The energy flowing from the battery to the charger is called "charging current."
But this is the same thing that is done by electric cars.
How do they do it?
In an electric car, a motor powers the car, not the battery.
The motor drives the wheels which pull the load (the car) and force energy back into the battery.
In a DC charger, the motor is used to convert AC electricity from the grid into DC electricity for the load.
And yes, all-electric cars use a DC charger.
They just happen to use a motor to do it.
And don't worry, I have several videos on the motor, but let's focus on the charger for now.
How can you use the energy in a DC charger?
You hook the same leads from the battery that the DC charger needs to the DC charger, and you can do any of these things with your load.
The first thing you want to do is run the car in electric mode.
This uses the electric motor to do the work that would otherwise be done by the gas engine.
The AC motor in the electric car is in "drive."
To charge your battery, just put it into AC mode.
Then hook up your load to the battery.
All the work will get done by the DC motor in the charger.
But this has nothing to do with the grid.
As long as the load is connected to the battery, it will use energy to do some work.
And because your car runs on DC electricity and the AC charger converts it to DC, that means you can turn your car off.
Your AC charger will just keep going on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on until you hook up your car to it and it stops.
The amount of work your car does in a particular mode will depend on the voltage of the battery and the current in the car.
So if you want to charge your car in a particularly high-power mode, you can just switch to a higher output voltage, like 14.8V or 24V.
In fact, it's even possible to do this at the flip of a switch.
Here's an electric car with two modes: AC and DC.
Now here's the important part, for more you can check https://www.gocharge.tech.
In each of these modes, the same amount of work is done, but the energy in the battery comes from two different sources.
This means that when you switch modes, the current in the DC charger flows back and forth between the battery and the load, and there is a potential to do some work in the process.
Now, in the same way, that it is not possible to directly convert the energy in your car to work, it's not possible to directly convert the work done by the DC charger to electric power.
However, there are some clever things that can be done to convert some of this potential energy back to electricity.
So instead of trying to explain all that, I think it would be more interesting to discuss some simple examples.
Let's take a closer look at these electric car modes.
The AC mode
In this mode, the electric motor will convert the car's own AC current (using the generator) to a DC current to run the car.
As long as the car is in this mode, the charger will charge the battery.
The DC mode
Now, instead of converting the car's AC to DC, the charger will directly charge the car's battery using a series of resistors and capacitors.
There will be some loss in this process, so this is not the best way to charge the battery.
The "direct charge" method is called "regenerative braking."
There are two ways to do this.
The first is to actually use the motor itself to run the generator to produce the DC current.
The second is to use special electronics called "regenerative braking sensors" which can predict when the car is slowing down and convert some of that energy back into electricity.
This requires no special motors.
The technology has existed since the 1980s, and most large diesel trucks use it.
Let's take a closer look at the car that does this.
The first prototype for the Tesla electric car (nicknamed the Roadster) used this method to directly charge the battery.Â


















