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      How Does A Car Alternator Works?

      CarTrade Editorial Team

      CarTrade Editorial Team

      The power mill of your car mainly runs on fuel, spark, and air. And among these three, spark takes center stage. It takes responsibility for generating electricity to the engine. Your car’s battery takes the duty of supplying electricity, but the amount of charge produced by it is sufficient only for a few miles. For further charge, you need something that maintains electricity flow to the battery and that is where car alternator comes in. Its main job is to keep battery charged constantly so that once the car is down one need not worry about anything else.

      How does a car alternator works
      How does a car alternator works

      Now the question that arises is how exactly does an alternator works? For the starters, all cars in India and abroad have batteries that work on a potential difference of 12 V, but in order to keep a car going, your alternator has to work a little harder and generate an output between 13.5-14.8 Volts. The working of alternator begins with three components, Diode, Rotor, and Stator. When alternator’s belt spins the pulley, the rotor beneath it moves faster. Rotor is nothing but a bunch of magnets that are joined beneath a knitted nest of copper wires. Here, we call these wires as Stator. The joint movement of these two results in formation of charges that is then delivered to car’s battery.

      But there is one more important step included in this i.e. conversion of Alternate Current (AC) to Direct Current (DC). There is a diode assembly located in alternator that does this conversion. In technical language, these assemblies are known as voltage regulators. These come as built-in components in present day alternators. They also act as gate guards that stop overflow of current to battery. As soon as the voltage crosses a certain limit.