Wednesday 8 August 2018

voltage - Why can't one battery power an infinite number of leds (or anything else)?


If voltage is equal across parallel resistors, then why can't one battery supply power to a infinite number of leds, if they are all in parallel?



Answer



Because a battery, like any real power source, has an output impedance. The more current you draw, the lower the voltage output. Granted, for a battery the output is not simply a fixed resistor, but the principle remains the same.


As an example, let's pretend that a 12-volt battery has a 0.1 ohm output impedance. If you were to short the outputs of this notional battery, the current would be 12 v / 0.1 ohms, or 120 amps. By the same token, if a load were to draw 60 amps, the output of the battery would be 12 - (60 * 0.1), or 6 volts.



Another way to put it is that the output impedance sets an upper limit on the amount of power a battery (or any power source) can provide. For DC, this upper limit is (V * V / R) /4. In the case of our notional battery, this upper limit is 360 watts.


No comments:

Post a Comment

arduino - Can I use TI's cc2541 BLE as micro controller to perform operations/ processing instead of ATmega328P AU to save cost?

I am using arduino pro mini (which contains Atmega328p AU ) along with cc2541(HM-10) to process and transfer data over BLE to smartphone. I...