Okay, okay, so these ideas were coming from a larger documentation project I was working, but for the sake of timeliness and succinct containment, I thought I’d write a separate blog article on the subject.
What is an inductor? Basically, it’s kind of like a capacitor but the opposite in a few key ways. Both capacitors and inductors store energy. A capacitor stores energy in electric charge. An inductor stores energy in a magnetic field. As you know from the basic laws of electromagnetism, electric fields and magnetic fields go hand-in-hand with electromagnetic radiation. A changing electric field causes a changing magnetic field, and vice versa.
Okay, that all makes sense in concept, but what does this mean an inductor does in an electronic circuit? First of all, let’s review what a capacitor does in an electronic circuit. When a voltage source (i.e. battery) and a capacitor are connected, the capacitor will start charging up. Current will flow through the capacitor until it is charged up to the same voltage as the voltage source, at which point it will block the flow of current, i.e. it will resist the flow of current. Then, when the voltage source is disconnected, the capacitor will act like its own voltage source and supply current until it is fully discharged. Just like a battery, the voltage a capacitor supplies will gradually decay until it has no more charge left.
That being said, an inductor acts in the opposite fashion of a capacitor. An inductor, when fully discharged, will resist the flow of current. When an inductor is charged up in accordance with the supplied power, it will allow current to flow with low resistance, pretty much just like a wire. Then, when the voltage source is removed, an inductor will discharge. But, here’s the key difference to understand. Rather than acting as a voltage source, an inductor will act as a current source. In the typical case of electronics, you’d use Ohm’s Law to solve for the unknown current that would flow through a circuit using the known voltage and resistance. In the case of inductors, the current and resistance are known, but the voltage is unknown.
Of course, in the simple case of a test circuit that sets up inductor charging and discharging to power an light just like a capacitor, not much changes here. Once you switch off the voltage source, you have a constant resistance load such as a light and the known current that the inductor was charged up to. Immediately at the point the power was switched off, you can compute the inductor’s supply voltage based off of the current and resistance, and this will work out to be the same as the voltage source. Then, as the circuit runs, the current and voltage will decay in tandem as the inductor’s stored energy runs out, just like a capacitor. And, therefore, the light intensity will also decay.
Beyond the inverted behavior of how an inductor passes or blocks current compared to a capacitor, the other difference can only be observed in circuits with variable resistance loads. First, an inductor is charged up and the voltage source is removed so that the inductor will be powering a load. When the load’s resistance increases, an inductor will also boost its supply voltage in order to keep current flow the same. Likewise, when resistance decreases, an inductor will buck its supply voltage to keep current flow the same.
Solenoids and motors have coils in them to deliberately generate a magnetic field that will result in the physical motion of another magnetic device. However, because they have coils, they are also, therefore, inductors. The key caution of channeling the back-EMF (Electro-Motive Force, i.e. voltage) through protective diodes when controlling motors using modern CMOS semiconductor microcontrollers is because of this propety of inductors: when you switch off the power to a motor to deliberately cause high resistance to it to prevent continued motor motion, you are in effect trying to increase the resistance to an inductor. Therefore, the inductor will respond by boosting the voltage to try to keep the current flow the same. Therefore, rather than trying to completely resist this current flow and loose when the voltage spikes so high it destroys your CMOS semiconductor microcontroller, you instead provide a more desirable path for this high voltage current to dissipate through instead, until there is no more current that must be dissipated.
On the other hand, the ability of inductors to boost their supply voltage is key to the implementation of boost switched-mode power supplies. A buck switched-mode power supply can be implemented with ease using only capacitors: just switch off the voltage source to a capacitor when its voltage gets too high, and switch it back on when its voltage gets too low. But for a boost switched-mode power supply, a capacitor is never going to give you a higher voltage than you supply to it. Nevertheless, even for implementing buck switched-mode power supplies, inductors simplify the implementation because it is easier to sense their voltage when being charged and determine what their supply voltage at a particular current draw is going to be once the voltage source is removed.
And those are the conceptual keys that you need to know about an inductor. Now we can get into basically the beginning of what the Wikipedia article says about inductors, now that you have a concrete conceptual understanding.
20200325/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductor
An inductor resists changes in current as defined by the following differential equation.
emf = -H * dI/dt
Electromotive force, i.e. voltage, is proportional to the inductance times the change in current over the change in time. A negative sign is used to indicate that this is an opposite, opposing voltage compared to the supply voltage and current. As we have previously explained the derivation of the capacitor equation, you should see how the two are intuitively related based off of the previous conceptual discussion.
V = -H * dI/dt
I = -C * dV/dt
Once again, just like the case with capacitors, you must use the exponential growth and decay equations to compute how long it will take to charge and discharge an inductor. So let’s derive the corresponding exponential growth/decay equations.
V = -H * dI/dt
-V / H = dI/dt
V = I * R
-I * R / H = dI/dt
let k = -R / H
kI = dI/dt
I(t) = I(0) * e^(k * t)
I(t) = I(0) * e^(-R * t / H)
So, now let’s consider the simple test circuit for an inductor powering a purely resistive load. Using the exponential decay equation, you can easily find out how long the light will be lit at a sufficient intensity by solving for a minimum acceptable current draw, determined using Ohm’s Law with the minimum acceptable supply voltage.
I_e = I_0 * e^(-R * t / H)
I_e / I_0 = e^(-R * t / H)
ln (I_e / I_0) = -R * t / H
t = -H / R * ln (I_e / I_0)
Now, as mysterious as inductors are, let’s try a concrete example with some familiar values to make this more intuitive. Suppose you have a 5 V battery and a 220 Ohm resistor to charge up a 22 uH inductor. There is an LED in series with a 220 Ohm resistor that wired in parallel to the inductor. When you switch off the battery power source, how long will the LED remain lit? The LED must have a supply voltage above 1 V to stay lit.
I = V / R
t = -H / R * * ln (I_e / I_0)
H = 22 uH = 0.000022 H
V_0 = 5 V
V_e = 1 V
I_0 = 5 V / 220 Ohms ~= 20 mA = 0.000020 A
I_e = 1 V / 220 Ohms ~= 5 mA = 0.000005 A
t = -0.000022 H / 220 Ohms * ln (0.000005 A / 0.000020 A)
t = 0.0000001386e sec. = 0.139 us
Okay, that is a really short time for an LED to remain lit, like you’d never even know you have an energy storage device at all. Let’s try our “super-inductor” made by winding a single layer of 30 AWG magnet wire around a toroidal ferrite core 22.6 mm in outside diameter.
H = 617758.919 uH = 0.617758919 H
t = -0.617759 H / 220 Ohms * ln (0.000005 A / 0.000020 A)
t = 0.003893 sec. = 3.893 ms
That barely makes for a nicer energy storage reservoir. Now, if you put that in an oscillator, that would result in an audible 257 Hz frequency, that’s like a C3 “middle C.”
Now, take a good careful look at these equations. One thing to realize is that the effect of a resistor in discharging an inductor is opposite compared to using a resistor to discharge a capacitor. Using a larger resistor when discharging a capacitor will increase the time your capacitor can run before it is empty. By contrast, using a larger resistor when discharging an inductor will increase the supply voltage until the current draw is the same, and by the equations, the time to discharge the inductor will also decrease. This is to be expected since drawing a higher voltage at the same current draw consumes more power, so the stored energy inside an inductor will run out faster. But, when you use a low-value resistor that allows lots of current to run with ease, then the same amount of current will be supplied, but at a much lower voltage, which means the power draw will be less and the inductor will run for longer. This is also the reason why using resistors in the flyback diodes of a motor driver circuit allows the motor to slow down faster: the back EMF discharges faster at the expense of experiencing higher voltages.
Suffice it to say, small inductors are not very useful for energy storage per se. Rather, their main uses are, of course, due to the “special effects” of an inductor: boosting voltage, bucking voltage, filtering radio frequencies, and generating magnetic fields. Magnetic fields, in particular, have many energy transfer applications: solenoids and motors convert magnetic fields to kinetic energy, and special “half transformers” can be used to “wirelessly” transfer electrical energy over short distances without direct electrical contact.
Finally, with that knowledge in hand, we can explain how a transformer works. Why does power only flow through a transformer when it is given an alternating current? Because electromotive force, i.e. voltage, is only induced in an inductor when there is a change in current. So, in order for power to keep flowing through to the other side of a transformer, the current must keep changing. Finally, we know that the minimum frequency that current must keep changing at for power to keep flowing is based off of the inductance of the coils: larger inductance coils will take longer to charge up and discharge, so electromotive force will continue to be induced for a longer period of time, even when the current is not changing very quickly. Therefore, larger coils are needed for low-frequency alternating currents than for high-frequency alternating currents.