How electricity generators and dynamos work - Explain that Stu

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: April 22, 2016.

Oil may be the world's favorite fuel, but not for much longer. Modern homes are powered mostly by electricity and it won't be long before most of us are driving electric cars
as well. Electricity is superbly convenient. You can produce it in all kinds of dierent ways using everything from coal and oil to wind and waves. You can make it in one place
and use it on the other side of the world if you want to. And, once you've produced it, you can store it in batteries and use it days, weeks, months, or even years later. What
makes electric power possibleand indeed practicalis a superb electromagnetic device called an electricity generator: a kind of electric motor working in reverse that
converts ordinary energy into electricity. Let's take a closer look at generators and nd out how they work!
Photo: A typical electricity generator. This one can make up to 225kW of electric power and is used for testing prototype wind turbines. Photo by Lee Fingersh courtesy of US
Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory (DOE/NREL).

Where does electricity come from?

The best way to understand electricity is to start by giving it its proper name: electrical energy. If you want to run anything electrical, from a toaster or a toothbrush to an
MP3 player or a television, you need to feed it a steady supply of electrical energy. Where are you going to get that from? There's a basic law of physics called the
conservation of energy that explains how you can get energyand how you can't. According to this law, there's a xed amount of energy in the universe and some good news
and some bad news about what we can do with it. The bad news is that we can't create more energy than we have already; the good news is that we can't destroy any energy

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either. All we can ever do with energy is convert it from one form into another.

If you want to nd some electricity to power your television, you won't be making energy out of thin air: the conservation of energy tells us that's impossible. What you'll be
doing is using energy converted from some other form into the electrical energy you need. Generally, that happens in a power plant some distance from your home. Plug in
your TV and electrical energy ows into it through a cable. The cable is much longer than you might think: it actually runs all the way from your TVunderground or through
the airto the power plant where electrical energy is being prepared for you from an energy-rich fuel such as coal, oil, gas, or atomic fuel. In these eco-friendly times, some of
your electricity will also be coming from wind turbines, hydroelectric power plants (which make power using the energy in dammed rivers), or geothermal energy (Earth's
internal heat). Wherever your energy comes from, it'll almost certainly be turned into electricity with the help of a generator. Only solar cells make electricity without using
generators.
Photo: A large electricity generator driven by steam at CalEnergy's Leathers geothermal power plant in Imperial County, California. Photo by Warren Gretz courtesy of US
Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory (DOE/NREL).

How can we generate electricity?

Photo: A typical electric motor. An electricity generator has exactly the same components but works in the opposite way, turning motion into electrical energy.
If you've read our detailed article about electric motors, you'll already know pretty much how generators work: a generator is just an electric motor working in reverse. If
you've not read that article, you might like to take a quick look before reading on but here's a quick summary either way.
An electric motor is essentially just a tight coil of copper wire wrapped around an iron core that's free to rotate at high speed inside a powerful, permanent magnet. When you
feed electricity into the copper coil, it becomes a temporary, electrically powered magnetin other words, an electromagnetand generates a magnetic eld all around it.
This temporary magnetic eld pushes against the magnetic eld that the permanent magnet creates and forces the coil to rotate. By a bit of clever design, the coil can be
made to rotate continuously in the same direction, spinning round and round and powering anything from an electric toothbrush to an electric train.

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So how is a generator dierent? Suppose you have an electric toothbrush with a rechargeable battery inside. Instead of letting the battery power the motor that pushes the
brush, what if you did the opposite? What if you turned the brush back and forth repeatedly? What you'd be doing would be manually turning the electric motor's axle around.
That would make the copper coil inside the motor turn around repeatedly inside its permanent magnet. If you move an electric wire inside a magnetic eld, you make
electricity ow through the wirein eect, you generate electricity. So keep turning the toothbrush long enough and, in theory, you would generate enough electricity to
recharge its battery. That, in eect, is how a generator works. (Actually, it's a little bit more tricky than this and you can't actually recharge your toothbrush this way, though
you're welcome to try!)

How does a generator work?

Take a length of wire, hook it up to an ammeter (something that measures current), and place it between the poles of a magnet. Now move the wire sharply through the
invisible magnetic eld the magnet produces and a current will briey ow through the wire (registering on the meter). This is the basic science behind the electricity
generator, demonstrated in 1831 by British scientist Michael Faraday. If you move the wire in the opposite direction, you generate a current that ows the other way. (If you're
interested, you can gure out the direction in which the current ows using something called the right-hand rule or generator rule, which is the mirror image of the left-hand
rule used to gure out how motors work.)
The important thing to notice is that you generate a current only when you move the wire through the magnetic eld (or when you move a magnet past a wire, which amounts
to the same thing). It's not enough just to place a wire near a magnet: to generate electricity, either the wire has to move past the magnet or vice-versa. Suppose you want to
generate lots of electricity. Lifting a wire up and down all day isn't going to be much funso you need to devise some way of moving a wire past a magnet by mounting one or
the other of them on a wheel. Then, when you turn the wheel, the wire and magnet will move with respect to one another and an electric current will be produced.
Now here's the interesting part. Suppose you bend a wire into a loop, sit it between the poles of a magnet, and arrange it so it will constantly rotateas in the diagram here.
You can probably see that as you turn the loop, each side of the wire (either the orange side or the green side) will sometimes be moving up and sometimes moving down.
When it's moving up, electricity will ow one way; when it's moving down, the current will ow the other way. So a basic generator like this will produce an electric current
that reverses direction every time the loop of wire ips over (in other words, an alternating current or AC). However, most simple generators actually produce direct
currentso how do they manage it?

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Artwork: A simple generator like this produces alternating current (an electric current that periodically reverses). Each side of the generator (green or orange) is either
moving up or down. When it moves up, it will generate a current owing one way; when it moves down, the current ows the other way. If you're a meter connected to the
wire, you don't know which way the wire is moving: all you see is that the direction of the current periodically reverses: you see an alternating current.

DC generators

Just as a simple DC electric motor uses direct current (DC) electricity to produce continual, rotary motion, so a simple DC generator produces a steady supply of direct
current electricity when it spins around. Like a DC motor, a DC generator uses a commutator. It sounds technical, but it's just a metal ring with splits in it that periodically
reverses the electrical contacts from the generator coil, reversing the current at the same time. As we saw up above, a simple loop of wire automatically reverses the current
it produces every half-turn, simply because it's rotating, and the commutator's job is to cancel out the eect of the coil's rotation, ensuring that a direct current is produced.

AC Alternators
What if you want to generate alternating current (AC) instead of direct current? Then you need an alternator, which is simply an AC generator. The simplest kind of alternator
is like a DC generator without a commutator. As the coil or magnets spin past one another, the current naturally rises, falls, and reverses, giving an AC output. Just as there
are AC induction motors, which use electromagnets to produce a rotating magnetic eld instead of permanent magnets, so there are alternators that work by induction in a
similar way.
Alternators are mostly used for generating electricity from vehicle engines. Cars use alternators, driven by their gasoline engines, which charge up their batteries as they
drive along (the AC current is converted to DC by diodes or rectier circuits).
Artwork: Comparing the simplest DC generator with the simplest AC alternator. In this design, the coil (gray) spins between the poles of a permanent magnet. Each time it
rotates through a half-turn, the current it generates reverses. In the DC generator (top), a commutator reverses the current every time the coil moves a half-turn, cancelling
out the reversal of the current. In the AC alternator (bottom), there is no commutator so the output simply rises, falls, and reverses as the coil rotates. You can see the output
current from each type of generator in the chart on the right.
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Generators in the real world

Generating electricity sounds simpleand it is. The hard thing is that you need to put in a huge amount of physical eort to generate even small amounts of power. You'll
know this if you have a bicycle with dynamo lights powered from the wheels: you have to pedal somewhat harder to make the lights glowand that's just to produce the tiny
amount of electricity you need to power a couple of torch bulbs. A dynamo is simply a very small electricity generator. At the opposite extreme, in real power plants, gigantic
electricity generators are powered by steam turbines. These are a bit like spinning propellers or windmills driven using steam. The steam is made by boiling water using
energy released from burning coal, oil, or some other fuel. (Note how the conservation of energy applies here too. The energy that powers the generator comes from the
turbine. The energy that powers the turbine comes from the fuel. And the fuelif it's coal or oiloriginally came from plants powered by the Sun's energy. The point is simple:
energy always has to come from somewhere.)
Photo: An alternator is a generator that produces AC (alternating current) instead of DC (direct current). Here we can see a mechanic removing the alternator from an
outboard motor boat engine. Photo by Yesenia Rosas courtesy of US Navy.

Portable generators

Photo: A portable electricity generator powered by a diesel engine. Photo by JoAnn S. Makinano courtesy of US Air Force and Defense Imagery.
Most of the time we take electricity for granted. We switch on lights, TVs, or clothes washers without stopping to think that the electrical energy we're using has to come from
somewhere. But what if you're working outdoors, in the middle of nowhere, and there's no electricity supply you can use to power your chainsaw or your electric drill?

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One possibility is to use cordless tools with rechargeable batteries. Another option is go for pneumatic tools, such as jackhammers. These are entirely mechanical and
powered by compressed air instead of electricity. A third option is to use a portable electricity generator. It's simply a small gasoline engine (petrol engine), similar to the
compact engine you get on a motorcycle, with an electricity generator attached. As the engine chugs away, burning up gasoline, it pushes a piston back and forth, turning a
generator and producing a steady electric current as its output. With the help of a transformer, you can use a generator like this to produce pretty much any voltage you need,
anywhere you need it. As long as you have enough gasoline, you can make your own electricity supply indenitely. But remember the conservation of energy: run out of gas
and you run out of electricity as well!
Artwork: Generator technology advanced rapidly during the 19th century. English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday built the rst primitive generator in 1831. Within a
few decades, numerous inventors were building practical electric generators. This one (a "dynamo-electric machine") was designed by Edward Weston in the 1870s as a way
to "transmute mechanical energy into electrical energy with greater eiciency than heretofore." It has a static outer ring of magnets (blue) and a rotating armature (coils) in
the center (red). A commutator (green) converts the generated current to DC. From US Patent 180,082 reissue 8,141 by Edward Weston, courtesy of US Patent and
Trademark Oice.
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On this website
You might like these other articles on our site covering related topics:
Batteries
Electric motors
Energy
Power plants
Renewable energy

Videos
How does a generator work?: An excellent short video by Dr Jonathan Hare and the Vega Science Trust demonstrates very clearly how moving a coil through a magnetic
eld can produce electricity.

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Simple generator: electric generator for science fair: William Beaty gives a step-by-step guide to building a simple generator using easy-to-nd components (enamel wire,
magnets, cardboard, and so on).
Bicycle generator: How to power a food processor with a bicycle driving an alternator (a type of electricity generator). Quite a neat experiment, though the commentary
could be a little clearer.

Books
For older readers
Diesel Generator Handbook by L. L. J. Mahon. Newnes, 1992. A detailed technical reference aimed at both engineers and academics.
Stallcup's Generator, Transformer, Motor and Compressor by James G. Stallcup. Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2008. A practical reference for people who have to design and
use rotating machinery.
For younger readers
Eyewitness: Electricity by Steve Parker. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2005.
Electricity: Make it Work by Alexandra Parsons. Princeton, NJ: Two-Can, 2000.
Cool Science: Experiments with Electricity and Magnetism by Chris Woodford. New York: Gareth Stevens, 2010: A practical approach to electricity and magnetism. (One
of my own books.)
Routes of Science: Electricity by Chris Woodford. New York: Facts on File, 2004: The history of electricity, from ancient to modern. (Another of my books.)

Articles
Power Grids Iy, Populous Areas Go for Generators by Ken Belson. The New York Times. April 24, 2013. Describes how people have acquired their own diesel or natural
gas generators to cope with power outages in rural areas.

If you liked this article...

You might like my new book, Atoms Under the Floorboards: The Surprising Science Hidden in Your Home, published worldwide by Bloomsbury.
Please do NOT copy our articles onto blogs and other websites
Text copyright Chris Woodford 2009, 2012. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice and terms of use.

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