an autodidact meets a dilettante…

the guts of an induction cooker, I believe

Canto: So, with all the fuss and excitement about renewables, we should continue the near impossible task of trying to get our heads around electricity, never mind renewable sources of electricity. It’s still electrickery to me. For example, Saul Griffith in The Big Switch recommends inductive electric stoves as a replacement for gas, which many swear by because they appear to heat your pot immediately, or at least very quickly compared to those old ring electric heaters…

Jacinta: Yes, but as Griffith says in that book, you can tell the gas isn’t too efficient because you feel yourself getting hot when you’re near the stove. That’s heat that isn’t going into the pot. Apparently that doesn’t happen with inductive electricity, which heats the pot just as rapidly if not more so, but almost nothing’s ‘wasted’ into the surrounding air.

Canto: Unless you like to feel toasty warm in the kitchen. Anyway we’re talking about induction cooktops,to give them their proper name, apparently. The old electric cooktops had those coils, and they’re what we grew up with. Here’s a summary from the Forbes website:

Also known as radiant cooktops, electric cooktops offer centralized heat. Electric cooktops have an electrical current that flows through a metal coil underneath the glass or ceramic surface. The coil becomes hot and starts glowing due to the electrical resistance. It will transfer its heat through the glass using infrared energy. This means the burner holding your pot or pan is the one that gets hot. Your food is then cooked by the transfer of heat between the cooktop and the pot. There is residual heat for an undetermined amount of time with electric cooktops, which is why these ranges tend to have an indicator light letting you know that the burner is still warm.

Jacinta: Metal coils under glass or ceramics…? As I recall, they were just coils, not under anything. They were grey. But maybe they were ceramic, with metal embedded within, or on the underside. I wish I was the type who pulled things apart to see how they worked, like geeky kids. And wtf is ‘infrared energy’? As far as I remember, the coils turned visible red when hot, not invisible infrared.

Canto: You see the red light but you feel the infrared heat. The heat you feel from the sun is in the non-visible part of the spectrum – the infrared and beyond. On the other side of the visible spectrum is the ultraviolet and beyond. I think.

Jacinta: So which side has the long wavelengths and which side has the short? – not that this would mean much to me.

Canto: Infrared radiation is about longer wavelength, lower frequency waves than visible light, and ultraviolet radiation is higher frequency and shorter wavelengths. So they bookend invisible light, if you will. But the longest wavelength, lowest frequency waves are radio waves, followed by microwaves, while the highest frequency, shortest wavelength radiation is gamma rays. Whether there are forms of radiation beyond these ends of the spectrum, I don’t know.

Jacinta: I’ve heard of gravitational waves, which were only detected recently. What about them?

Canto: They can have almost infinitely long wavelengths apparently. So to speak. Obviously if they were ‘infinitely’ long, if that’s even meaningful, they’d be undetectable. But let’s get back down to earth, and the most useful energy. Here’s how the Red Energy website describes induction cooktops:

Basically, a standard electric or gas cooktop transfers heat (or conducts heat) from the cooktop to the pot or pan. Whereas, an induction cooktop ‘switches on’ an electromagnetic field when it comes into contact with your pot or pan (as long as the cookware contains a ferrous material like iron or steel). The heat comes on fast and instantly starts cooking the contents.

Jacinta: Okay that explains nothing much, as I don’t know, really, how an electromagnetic field works (still stupid after all these years). As to ferrous cookware, I didn’t realise you could use anything else.

Canto: Well the same website says that, given the speed of heating, you might need to upgrade to cookware that can take the stress, so to speak. As to the electromagnetic field thing, Red Energy doesn’t really explain it, but the key is that an electromagnetic field doesn’t require the heating of an element – those coily things.

Jacinta: They’ve eliminated the middle man, metaphorically speaking? I’m all in for eliminating men, even metaphorically.

Canto: Thanks. So I’m trying to get my head around this. I need to delve further into the meaning of this magical, presumably infrared, heat. The essential term to explore is electromagnetic induction, and then to join that understanding to the practical aspects, yer everyday cooking. So this goes back to the working-class hero Michael Faraday, and the Scottish hero J C Maxwell, which will be fun, though of course I’m not at all nationalistic, but…

Jacinta: Canto isn’t a particularly Scottish name is it?

Canto: My real name is Camran Ciogach Ceannaideach, but I prefer a simpler life. Anyway electromagnetic induction has a great variety of applications, but this is the ultimate, i.e Wikipedia, definition:

Electromagnetic or magnetic induction is the production of an electromotive force across an electrical conductor in a changing magnetic field.

Jacinta: None the wiser. What’s an electromotive force?

Canto: Called emf, it’s ‘the electrical action produced by a non-electrical source, measured in volts’. That’s also Wikipedia. So a non-electrical source might be a battery (which is all about chemistry) or a generator (all about steam in industrial revolution days -creating mechanical energy).

Jacinta: So the infernal combustion engine somehow converts petrol into mechanical energy? How does that happen?

Canto: Off topic. This is really difficult stuff. Here’s another Wikipedia quote which might take us somewhere:

In electromagnetic induction, emf can be defined around a closed loop of conductor as the electromagnetic work that would be done on an electric charge (an electron in this instance) if it travels once around the loop.

Jacinta: Right, now everything’s clear. But seriously, all I want to know is how to get rid of that middle man. We were talking abut cooking, remember?

Canto: So emf is also called voltage, or measured in volts, which I seem to recall learning before. Anyway, nowadays electromagnetic induction is everywhere – for example that’s how money gets removed from your bank account when you connect those cards in your wallet to those machines in the shop.

Jacinta: So they’re zapping your card, sort of?

Canto: I’ve looked at a few sites dealing with electromagnetic induction, and they all give me the same feel, that it’s like weird magic. I suppose because they explain how it works but not why.

Jacinta: Shut up and calculate?

Canto: Anyway, induction cooking has been around for more than a century, but it’s really catching on now. They always say it’s more direct, because it doesn’t involve heating an element.

Jacinta: Don’t you know it’s magic?

Canto: No, it’s magnetic. Which explains nothing. But let me try another website, this time Frigidaire:

Induction cooktops heat pots and pans directly, instead of using an electric or gas-heated element. It boils water up to 50 percent faster than gas or electric, and maintains a consistent and precise temperature. The surface stays relatively cool so spills, splatters and occasional boil-overs don’t burn onto the cooktop, making clean-up quick and easy…. Induction cooking uses electric currents to directly heat pots and pans through magnetic induction. Instead of using thermal conduction (a gas or electric element transferring heat from a burner to a pot or pan), induction heats the cooking vessel itself almost instantly….. An electric current is passed through a coiled copper wire underneath the cooking surface, which creates a magnetic current throughout the cooking pan to produce heat. Because induction doesn’t use a traditional outside heat source, only the element in use will become warm due to the heat transferred from the pan. Induction cooking is more efficient than traditional electric and gas cooking because little heat energy is lost. Like other traditional cooktops, the evenly heated pots and pans then heat the contents inside through conduction and convection…. Important: For induction to work, your cookware must be made of a magnetic metal, such as cast iron or some stainless steels.

Jacinta: So I’m not sure if that gets closer to an explanation, but what’s surely missing is how magnetism, or a magnetic current, creates heat. It doesn’t use an ‘element’, but it must use something. I know that heat is energy, essentially, and presumably an electric current is energy, or force, like emf, which is also energy…

Canto: Yes it’s very confusing. The Wikipedia article gets into the maths fairly quickly, and when it describes applications it doesn’t mention cooking… Hang on, it takes me to a link on induction cooking. So here’s a definition, similar to the Frigidaire one, but a little more concise. Something to really zero in on:

In an induction stove (also “induction hob” or “induction cooktop”), a cooking vessel with a ferromagnetic base is placed on a heat-proof glass-ceramic surface above a coil of copper wire with an alternating electric current passing through it. The resulting oscillating magnetic field wirelessly induces an electrical current in the vessel. This large eddy current flowing through the resistance of a thin layer of metal in the base of the vessel results in resistive heating.

I’ve kept in the links, which I usually remove. For our further education. So it’s the resistance of the metal base of the pan that produces heat. Something like incandescent light, which is produced through the resistance of the tungsten filament, which makes it glow white (this was a light bulb moment for me). So you really have to use the right cookware.

Jacinta: Thanks for the links – yes, the key is that ‘resistive heating’, also called Joule heating. James Joule, as well as Heirnrich Lenz, independently, found that heat could be generated by an electric current, and, by experimental testing and measurement, that the heat produced was proportional to the square of the current (which is basically the emf, I think), multiplied by the electrical resistance of the wire. So you can see that the wire (or in cooking, the pot) will heat more readily if it has a high electrical resistance. This can be stated in a formula: , where P is the heating power generated by an electrical conductor (measured usually in watts), I is the current, and R is the resistance.

Canto: So we’ve made progress, but it’s the relation of magnetism to electricity – that’s what I don’t get, and that’s the key to it all. I think I understand that an electric current creates a magnetic field – though not really – and I get that an alternating current would induce an oscillating magnetic field, I think, but is this just observation without understanding? That electricity and magnetism are connected, so just shut up and calculate as you say?

Jacinta: So how, and why a high frequency alternating current creates a dynamic field, that’s what we’re trying to understand. And what’s an eddy current?

Canto: I think we’ve had enough for now, but we’re getting there….