If you had a battery running a fan and a magnet/copper coil mechanism running back to battery?

Question

The actual question I'm asking is if a battery already has enough power to run a fan and the fan has a magnet/ copper coil electric generator mechanism attached to it and running back to the battery, would it last longer? 


 
In this example we are assuming the battery is able to be recharged.  
As far as I have read the majority of large scale electric power is produced basically and ultimately by having magnets moving/spinning near/through copper components.

So the fan would have a similar mechanism connected to whatever adequately and consistently spinning/moving parts there maybe.

A good example is the alternator in gas powered cars that recharges the battery by using a similar mechanism as described above connected to moving parts within the engine.

Obliviously the in the gas powered car the battery could recharge itself totally as long as there were gas to power the car. In the "fan example" it would eventual run out I assume. The question being would it last longer?

Answer

The answer is no. The battery would be powering the fan and the generator. The generator would be putting about 99% of any power gained back into the battery. All you would be doing is moving the energy from one place to another - only with a small loss.

If the fan was being powered by an external force, for example wind, and that was connected to a generator that was recharging the battery then that would be a different matter. The energy would be coming from the power of the wind, which would be converted through the rotary motion of the fan into electricity via the generator.

The generator would have a magnet spinning in the center of multiple coils of copper wire. This would produce an electric current which would recharge the battery which could either power the original fan ( a little pointless ) or be used to power another fan entirely.

In the set-up in your original question it would actually not last as long in comparison with not having the generator in the system in the first place, as that would eliminate any energy loss which is present in all electrical circuits.

Hope this helps.

If you had a battery running a fan and a magnet/copper coil mechanism running back to battery?

Answers (1)