An Electromagnetic Field is Free

An electromagnetic field does not come from the power source

Most people who are electrically inclined believe that an electromagnetic field surrounding a current carrying wire is the same energy that has originated from the power source.

It is true that the electromagnetic field surrounding that wire is in proportion to the current. But what isn't so revealing is that the electromagnetic field surrounding this wire really doesn't have anything to do with the original power source.

Then what is the electromagnetic field? Let's say we start out with 100% of the energy and we call that energy let's say 1 joule of energy. If that 1 joule of energy flows through a load then that load has performed 1 joule's worth of work. Ok so far, so good.

All 100% of that 1 joule of energy is going back to the source in order to destroy it. Now I didn't say that the energy is being destroyed since we can't create nor destroy energy, but we can only transform it.

In reality the power source itself is being destroyed at 100%! For instance if the power source is a battery then the composition and material of that battery is being completely annihilated. The energy itself is actually being transformed into heat waste.

It is this heat that is totally wasting away the power source rendering it inoperable after a period of time. Heat in and of itself is just vibrating energy. So even though 100% of the energy is being completely wasted away at a 100% rate, guess what? It hasn't gone anywhere and it's still there! It is still energy regardless of what form it is in, namely heat in this instance.

So if 100% of the energy still exists but is now in a different form which is now heat, what does that make the electromagnetic field surrounding the current carrying wire? When power is cutoff and the magnetic field has no where to go it then collapses. This now collapsed magnetic field can return a certain percentage of power back to us.

At this point many people might think, oh this is just part of the same energy that came from the power source in the first place. It is in proportion to the energy of the power source. In other words whatever energy is contained in the magnetic field is the energy of the power source itself.

If we get back 80% of our original 100% then it is only 80% efficient. The problem is that our meters are reading the electrical input as well as the electrical output, but that's it. The meter that is reading input power is actually reading 100% of the energy that is completely wasting away and destroying the power source.

Regardless of reading 100% wasted energy on the input, it's still energy and power being read on a meter! It is a completely separate flow of power that is happening at a completely different time when compared to the energy stored in the magnetic field when it collapses and returns a percentage of power back to us.

The only problem is that we have a hard time collecting this energy coming out of the power supply and then returning back to it in order to completely destroy it. However we like to say that this energy that is going back to the power supply to destroy it is the same energy that is stored in the magnetic field. Is it really?

The problem is that we are not saving, keeping, or recovering any of the input energy electrically. But this doesn't mean that we should discount this as energy and subtract it from the output energy, which is stored in the magnetic field.

If we are calculating electrical efficiency, then yes this is what we want to do, but electrical efficiency is not the entire equation and does not account for or define exactly where all the energy is located at in all points of the entire system.

If we were to actually include instead of take away the energy from the energy we recovered from the magnetic field collapsing, then in a perfect and ideal system we would actually have 200% of the energy accounted for. 100% of the energy would be recovered from the magnetic field while the other 100% would not be in the form of electrical energy but in the form of transformed energy into heat.

What is the point of all of this?

So what is the point of all of this? The point is that all 100% of the energy that came from the power source has gone into the load. The load has done 100% work which is directly related to the 100% of the energy that we started out with. Now we are back to the problem we had before.

If we start out with 100% of the energy and that energy is equal to 1 joule then how is it that we can get more work from the same energy source? Don't we have to have more energy in order to do more work?

As previously mentioned 1 joule of energy is equal to a 1 watt second, that is when the potential to do work becomes kinetic energy in motion. If we only have 1 joule of energy and can only get 1 joule's worth of work, then how is it that we can get more work than that done? Wouldn't we have to have more energy? Of course we would, and that goes to show that by recovering energy we are actually multiplying energy as well.

This also goes to show that the magnetic field is an energy source completely separate from the original power source. What we've been doing is taking on the perspective that the energy stored in the magnetic field is only part of the original energy. What we should be doing is including the original energy in the whole entire system of energy.

The reason we subtract instead of add the original energy when calculating electrical efficiency is because we are doing just that, calculating electrical energy. We do that by taking the output power we have measured and then dividing that into the input power we have measured.

If we calculate not only electrical efficiency, but wasted heat that's destroying and depleting away the power source as well, then we can clearly see that there is more energy that what we started out with.

In other words, it is correct to calculate electrical efficiency by dividing the output power into the input power. In a perfect system without losses then we would certainly calculate 100% energy in the system, that is electrically speaking.

If we then take the electrical input energy that we are measuring as completely wasted away energy and then consider the heat produced by that wasting away, we will see that the input energy is still there, but now in the form of heat.

This is energy that still exists but has been subtracted from the system because we consider it electrical energy that is not saved, stored, or recovered. When in fact it has only been dissipated as heat and has simply escaped the system out into the atmosphere.

So when we are measuring input power and energy into a load we are actually measuring in an indirect way the waste of the system in the form of heat escaping out into the atmosphere.

If we actually had the capability of storing, saving, and recovering the input energy as electricity instead of letting it escape out into the atmosphere to be never seen again, then we could include that in our electrical efficiency calculations. So instead of having a 100% electrical efficient system we would in fact have a 200% efficient system.