This video is sponsored by AnyDesk. You ever wake up in the morning and ask yourself: "what
happens when you wire a hundred car batteries in parallel?" If so, you're in luck, because that's
exactly what I'll be doing today. By wiring all these in parallel, the voltage is going to be the
same as a single battery, which is just a bit over 12 volts. Now I realize this seems lame compared
to what I usually show on this channel, but you see, this isn't a video about high voltage. Oh no,
we're playing with fire today. See that rating right there? That's how much current this battery
can deliver for 30 seconds in freezing temps, and that's 850 amps. So by wiring 100 of these
in parallel, we're looking at 85 000 amps. Of course, cable and contact resistance is
going to limit that somewhat, but I'm curious to see just how ridiculously high the current
can get here. I mean it's one thing to produce thousands of amps for a tiny fraction of a second,
but what does it look like when you make even more than that over a few seconds?
In fact, I'm hoping to achieve the currents seen in a lightning strike with these batteries.
The most daunting engineering task for this project was coming up with a way to switch
these massive currents, particularly one that can break the circuit when tens of
thousands of amps are flowing through it. I settled on modifying a log splitter,
mostly because it can rip apart contacts that weld themselves together. Now the best part about this
switch is that you load it like a crossbow. So let me show you this beautiful mechanism here.
So I gotta yank this back while feeding it this pin and it's not very easy. Let me just show you.
Okay so now it's loaded and I have to feed it this actuator so it can yank
out that pin. Let me just show you. You can see the actuator there that
yanks out that pin. So now when I hit this yeet switch, the contacts slam together.
and then if I have some catastrophic failure and need to kill power, I just press this frick
button here to rip apart those plates, oh and I also have to yank this string at the same time
seems safe enough right? Now I want to bore you with numbers, but I feel like it's important to
give you a sense of the crazy scale that I'm dealing with here. That bank holds an
incredible 320 megajoules of energy. That means that if one of those batteries fails short,
the energy equivalent of 500 cars screaming down the highway would get dumped into it all at once,
which would probably make a sizable crater. I really hope that doesn't happen.
Now I could go on and on about how clinically insane this is, but I should let the rest of
the video do the talking here. I will say that you definitely shouldn't play with car
batteries. I mean even one can mess you up if you abuse it enough, so yeah don't try this at home.
For the first test I'm going to try a piece of quarter inch threaded steel rod. This
should be easy to melt, but the small size will probably limit the current somewhat.
What?
it looks like the connection broke there. I mean it is only 12 volts,
so nearly anything can break the circuit here. I went ahead and
smacked the threads with a hammer a bit to hopefully give more area of contact.
It was slower than I hoped, but I did like the green flames from the zinc plating burning off.
Here I have a 3/8 inch threaded rod. Now this has over double the area of the last rod,
so it should pass quite a bit more current.
look at that wow
cool I think that one was just as fast if not faster! Let's try zapping some ferrocerium.
Now this is the metal alloy that makes up modern lighter flints, and it makes a bunch of sparks
when it's ground down. I'm hoping it makes even more sparks with these batteries. Here we go!
it just exploded! Maybe a bigger rod will give even more sparks? Here we go!
Hah I'll take that as a yes. Unfortunately it didn't actually burn all the way through there.
Gosh it's just so hard to keep contact with the voltage being so low. Maybe I just need
more weight. This is a kilogram Ingot of bismuth metal. It's super dense and melty,
so I'm hoping it will keep enough contact to melt all the way through.
Well that was messy! It splattered molten metal all over the place,
although a lot of it was unmelted. It still made a nice puddle though, plus the oxide layer on the
remaining ingot is super colorful. I want to try zapping this half inch bolt, but this time
I'm going to measure the current through it by looking at the voltage drop across the cables.
Yes! It took a while for it to secure contact, but once it did, it melted pretty quickly.
the oscillogram is noisy, but once it made full contact, there was a drop of about 180 millivolts
there. Now this is across a mere 16 millionths of an ohm, which means the current there was about 11
000 amps. Not bad. Let's give this saw blade a try. It's nice and flat and conductive;
it should pass a substantial amount of current.
it certainly burned through quickly, but I was hoping it would explode or something. oh well.
The current there was higher, a peak of fifteen thousand amps. Now that's
probably near the limit without making some modifications to the circuit.
Now if I can do 15 kilo amps for a few seconds, now that would be
pretty crazy, and it might be possible with this three-quarter inch bolt. Here we go!
You know, for as easy as it is for wires to short when you don't want them to,
it's been bafflingly difficult to hold a short across these batteries. Everything just keeps
blowing out of place. I've tried using all sorts of clamps and different materials,
but the results are all the same. Everything breaks contact. So this bank is scary,
however its voltage is not, and that's why I can do this and not feel anything. Besides, at only 15
000 amps, I haven't even hit the current of the average lightning strike yet. Are you telling me
some clouds can do better than 100 car batteries? So, is it time to throw all these batteries in
the ocean? Nope not yet. I think using a higher voltage will overcome these problems, so I rewired
the bank for a series-parallel arrangement. Now there are chains of five batteries in series, then
all those are wired in parallel. This makes the fully charged bank sit at a little over 60 volts.
Let's start the 60 volt experiments with another 3/8 inch steel rod. Here we go!
holy heck that exploded! The slo-mo shows something astonishing here. The rod heated
so quickly that its zinc coating boiled off faster than it could burn, and then when the rod finally
exploded, it left a cloud of greenish plasma, as the zinc vapor reacted with the oxygen in the air.
Comparing this to what happened at 12 volts, it's clear there's substantially more current
at 60 volts. Sure enough, I clocked a peak of thirty thousand amps, which so happens to be
the current of the average lightning strike. I still think I can do better though. Let's
see what happens when I try a half inch bolt. I guess those little clamps weren't enough.
I've upgraded to some big boy clamps this time, so hopefully this does the job.
I'll take that as a no.
Yeah that bolt really does not want to stay in those blocks. In fact let's take a look here
yeah look at that, it just leaves a big crater of splattering molten steel and copper.
wow. Let's see if quad clamping it will hold it in place.
heck. This was easier at 12 volts! What's going on here? Slow-mo shows the increased current has
introduced a new problem. These blocks are getting ripped apart by the gayest force field in physics,
the magnetic field. Now what's so gay about magnets? It turns out opposites don't always
attract like you might think. Yeah yeah, when you consider magnetic dipoles, north attracts
south and vice versa. However, if you look at currents that give rise to those fields,
you'll see the reverse happens to them. Opposite currents repel, and like currents attract. Now
this has a lot of interesting consequences in physics. It's why lightning pinches itself into
a fine streamer, and it's also the basis of experimental z-pinch fusion reactors. In this
circuit, it causes the aligned cables to bunch up, while repelling the cables carrying current in
the opposite direction, and this is what's ripping apart the copper blocks. In an attempt to fix this
issue, I brought in two of the leading experts in crackhead engineering, Allen Pan and the backyard
scientist. So you can see I've already tried blowing this thing up before but the current is
so gigantic and the magnetic field is so huge that like it doesn't want to stay on the block. yeah
yeah I wanna see what this does. yeah yeah you may not be safe but we'll do it. yeah we'll do it.
oh yeah it's literally an inch thick. we're gonna take this bad boy [Laughter] oh so that just oh my
God but the thing is these huge clamps they're not enough. tthe forces and currents are just so big.
oh yeah I want to put this last clamp on. yeah there we go. oh yeah. this is completely insane
this is it's like it's so bad. all right everyone ready? uh yeah I'm ready all right here we go
oh
it flew out of there again. did you see that? do you see the brown smoke? yeah it's copper vapor!
really? yes. that was like a like a firework from hell. the sparks shot out sideways. yeah yeah but
but the contact broke in like you know fraction of a second. wait is it safe to look up close?
yeah sort of. So the bolt is actually still there. yeah so that's the problem here is the uh it moves
it across like yeah. so there's two issues so it it explodes but also the magnetic field is all
opposing and it yanks it apart, so it barely held on. How would you fix this? like how how would you
guys find a way to keep to actually keep things on the block and blow up? how would you do it? I
think I could do it. how would you do it? I could do it. oh you just could yeah of course yeah. I
don't know. Could you like just drill some holes in the copper blocks and like through both into
a piece of wood or something? like a two by six and like just forced them in. You might be able
to. I feel like you don't want to keep everything in position. I'm scared if everything was locked
down. I'm scared of what would happen. sure sure oh my God but like I want to see that bolt
explode. I want to see it explode. yes yeah melt it. yeah just kind of bolt them to a piece of wood
like on the same piece of wood right? That's what I was saying. yeah okay that's what you're saying
oh so yeah the whole mechanism on one piece of wood. Wow that's that's a good idea, yeah. I was
just expecting like melting and explosive stuff but not a magnetic force, that's uh that's insane.
I do like the block of wood idea. the German word for horror and respect. oh yeah, whatever
that word is. yeah. Before attempting to bolt everything down to a block of wood, we decided
to stick a couple cans of 1,2-dimethylethane on the apparatus. All right you ready for
this? I don't usually wear safety goggles. you ready? I'm ready. all right here we go
oh my gosh wow oh it's still live. I'm gonna clear it off oh it's gonna spark be careful okay
oh
that was all wow. we tried sticking a can upright with the hope that it
would act like a rocket. It turns out this worked just a little too well.
wow wow. These fireballs were cool and all, but they also had the function of
clearing out some of that annoying grass out in front of the batteries.
I went ahead and mounted everything to a big block of wood. Now let's try another half inch bolt.
Wow it just exploded off of there.
Wow that's terrifying. Wow look at the remnants of that bolt there. They're welded on there.
wow. Looks like it took about a quarter of a second for that to melt through,
and the current peaked at over 40 000 amps. That is insane. The slo-mo shows two powerful magnetic
effects here. There are the cables in back violently pinching themselves into a bundle,
and also there's the broken bolt fragment getting launched outward due to the magnetic forces on it.
Well if the half inch bolt melts now, maybe the three quarters inch bolt will melt too.
It melted through! Wow that is really melted
on there. Interesting how it hollowed out the nut there.
jeez
I don't know if that one's coming off. My goodness. Yeah that that
liquid steel really bonded to the copper there.
There it goes. Jeez. It's funny, because as I keep trying bigger loads,
sparks get launched further and further, even beyond where I'm hiding for these shots. I
figured these tests would be intense, but they're already beyond my expectations.
This one's gonna be pretty crazy I think. It's that bismuth ingot that I couldn't melt earlier.
I thought its weight would be enough to hold it down but clearly not,
so I've used these spring clamps to hold it down now.
Holy heck! It made a huge mushroom cloud. There's not much of this thing left. It is splattered and
vaporized all over the place. Wow. I also managed to spray molten metal on the lenses of two of my
cameras with that run. Oops. At this point in the video, pretty much all the footage is terrifying,
but even so, this is probably the scariest shot so far. The batteries managed to take
nearly an entire kilogram of metal, and turn it into a cloud of vapor and liquid in a second.
The droplets being shot out are so hot that they're burning in air, leaving little trails
of smoke while raining burning molten metal on everything around it. Afterwards I found bits
of metal splattered on the trees, the sides of my shop, and even the table I was hiding behind.
The impressive pyrotechnic display of the bismuth convinced me to try a stick of titanium as well.
Titanium is used in fireworks for making bright white sparks, and it turns out it makes these
beautiful sparks when being zapped by a hundred car batteries as well. Who would have guessed?
In engineering, there's something called a crowbar circuit, and it's used to prevent an overvoltage
from killing the rest of the device. Now it got its name because it shorts the power supply much
like if you were to take a crowbar and throw it across the power rails. Now I think it'd be fun to
try the literal interpretation of this circuit. I decided to start with a smaller crowbar here first
holy heck! it came all the way back here! I had to dodge it. This one gave a really
cool oscillating effect as the crowbar kept breaking and then regaining contact,
which made the resulting explosions especially violent.
I threw in the bigger crowbar and this one burned through even faster. Here we go!
oh wow the head of that crowbar - oh my gosh! I just stepped on that and it about
burned through my shoe. jeez. Oh yeah that's hot. Well anyway I was seeing how the head of
that crowbar there is just welded onto that. It's flattened and melted down. That's insane.
I tossed some magnets in the middle of the wire loop there and you can see them jump once the
current starts, and yeah I put my camera way too close for this shot. Now something that sticks
out to me here is when the crowbar finally burns through and it shoots out a big plasma
fireball. My bet is that inductive kickback is playing a role here. I figure zapping a
couple of wrenches ought to be fun. Where's the leak ma'am? Let's start with a small one.
this big one should be nice and scary.
wow that one got real toasty! Look how welded that thing is on there.
Right here I have the biggest bolt that I could find at the hardware store. It's
an inch in diameter and 10 inches long. I think this should be fun to zap with the car batteries.
This is going to be crazy. I hope those clamps survive.
Did
that melt all the way through? So it just melted the steel around the threads there.
That's that's crazy. I didn't see that happen with the smaller bolts. So that's what kept it
from melting all the way through. It's just floating in the middle.
All right I'm gonna try it without the nut, just the bare bolt in there
whoa that was so loud! I don't even know what exploded there It was the fuses that blew! Look at
that they melted straight through! Wow that drew over 45 000 amps and it did it for over a second,
well at least before the fuses exploded. That's bonkers. I'm actually glad that the fuses exploded
here because it gives a cross reference for the currents I'm measuring. The Preece fuse current
equation predicts that a bank of 10 6 gauge wires in parallel will last a second at 50 000 amps
before exploding, and that's pretty much what I just saw. I'm only surprised how loud it was!
I upgraded the fuses to 4 gauge but at this point the batteries are really being abused,
so I'm going to do some other experiments before trying the big bolt again.
You're probably wondering how well this battery bank works as a plasma cutter,
well I am too honestly, and there's only one way to find out.
wow.
that works even better than I expected! The ground connection melted there so now
I just have it sitting on that copper block. let's give that another go
Yeah I think that'll do it. Let's try that with some steel that's a bit thicker.
oh geez
come on! all right let's try that again. I just want to cut it in half.
It's close enough. Well actually on second thought, let's cut it in half the other way.
wow! wow that was wild! A few sparks in my head there. wow that was fun! I've sprinkled
some magnetite there inside that loop of wire that, way you can visualize the magnetic field.
Yeah it really sticks to those cables.
I've placed the wire loop below a plastic tray for this shot. It's
crazy how quickly the magnetite orients itself near the wire, but then again,
the magnetic field here is probably a solid fraction of a tesla. By attaching some LEDs to
a coil of wire and placing it near the cables, I can get some rudimentary transformer action.
The
LEDs are being wirelessly powered by the alternating magnetic field.
I have this big old SCR here which is a type of solid-state switch. I want
to try popping it with the batteries. Here we go.
As expected, nothing happens yet because the SCR is off and it holds back the battery voltage.
Now let's do a little trolling and apply a signal to the gate.
it's funny because I'm used to silicon dying when looking at it wrong since I'm terrible at
electronics, however, the SCR was unaffected by this. The explosion was actually just the cables
popping out of the contacts because t.hey were only jammed in there. Let's give that another try
Wait are you serious? Did it - I don't think that- what?
I think it melted the bolt first. Much to my amazement, the magnetic field shredded the
whole setup before there was enough time for the SCR to pop, conducting an astonishing 45
000 amps and snapping one of the mounting bolts in the process. That is one tough piece of silicon.
I mounted everything back in the wooden block to keep it in place. Let's try that again.
It turns out the SCR had already failed short from the previous run which is why
it immediately blew up when the battery voltage was applied. This breaker says it can stop at 10
kilo amp fault. We'll see about that. All right let's see how well the circuit breaker holds up.
Did it trip? Oh let's see here. So it shows that it had a fault but it uh
It may have actually worked. It may have actually stopped that. Or did it not?
I think it's still alive. Let's try it again.
yeah it's welded to it now.
but it still tripped the circuit. That's impressive. I wasn't expecting that. I zapped some
magnesium but the results weren't that impressive relatively speaking. It melted too easily near
the contact points and prevented burn through, so I decided to try manually keeping contact.
[Laughter]
Let's try the same thing with ferrocerium.
Yeah that one explodes a bit softer than the magnesium did. That's cool. In fact
I bet yeah. Where's my science machete?
Well that's fun. I think titanium should be even
more impressive since it has such a high melting point.
Wow. and that's how to light the entire yard on fire. I love it.
All right the titanium flamethrower.
yes I got it!
oh good I got it! nice. Before light bulbs were a thing, there was something called a carbon arc
lamp that was pretty much just an electric candle. Well, I want to try making one with my batteries.
I've connected a couple chonky graphite rods to some cable.
I'm going to try initiating an arc by tapping them together.
okay
Wow that is incredibly bright. I smell like I smell like nitrogen oxides or something from that.
Look how hot that is! I'm gonna apply a really heavy neutral density filter,
that way you can hopefully see what that arc looks like.
That arc is actually getting huge, it's it's like hitting the ground there,
that's not just from the splatter from the burning electrodes. The
arc is gigantic. The magnetic field keeps throwing it around.
I think it's time to revisit the huge bolt that I couldn't melt earlier. All right I've got a
fresh new one inch bolt in there. Hopefully this time will be the charm. Here we go.
Yes! Oh it melted. Oh look at that, it finally burned through. Wow
there's so much heat coming off of that right now. Yeah I'm pretty sure
the radiation coming off of that bolt lit the wood on fire. Wow that thing got hot!
I clocked a peak of just a hair under 50 000 amps there. That's quite a bit more than the average
lightning strike, and for a much longer duration too. Total circuit power there was on the order
of three megawatts. You should not be measuring anything in mega for a YouTube video! I think
it's pretty cool. Who gave you these batteries? AnyDesk! Anydesk. Yeah it was their idea! It was
their idea, it's insane. That's right, this video is sponsored by AnyDesk, and in fact,
this entire video was their idea, which definitely makes them my coolest sponsor. So what is AnyDesk?
AnyDesk gives you lightning fast connection to all your devices. For example, I don't even need to
be near this terrifying battery bank when I want to blow something up with it. I can walk into an
Arby's a thousand miles from my lab and remotely fire the batteries in a tiny fraction of a second.
I love the future.
AnyDesk isn't only useful for shorting 100 car batteries. You can remotely control and
manage all your devices with low latency and on low bandwidth. Te other guys are
notorious for being laggy at the worst possible times, but AnyDesk is always lightning fast.
If you're cursed by being the most tech proficient member of your family or friend group,
well AnyDesk can save you time and frustration there too. You can remotely support loved ones
from wherever you want to be. AnyDesk is free for personal use and offers business plans that
are custom tailored to your IT and work from home needs. Download AnyDesk now at anydesk.com/styro .
So yeah a big thank you to AnyDesk for sponsoring this video. I gotta say, it took a lot longer to
make this video than I expected. Now part of that was I probably spent too much time with
the 12 volt experiments, but also, I really didn't know what to expect from a hundred car batteries.
I mean with most of my videos, I have a pretty good idea of what the end product is going to look
like, but with these I just I really didn't know. I mean I just had to throw things at the wall to
see what stuck, and this led to a lot of failed experiments, but at least a few of them were
interesting. I tried microwaving the output of the batteries hoping it would make a super hot plasma,
but the most I could get was a pop. The voltage just isn't high enough for this kind of thing.
I also tried saltwater electrolysis which did work in splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen,
but it just wasn't quite exciting enough. I was hoping for a violent boiling effect,
but I'd need quite a bit more voltage to pull it off in a setup like this.
My most disappointing failure was trying to crush a pipe via a magnetic pinch.
So back in the late 1800s, a lightning rod was mysteriously crushed inward by a lightning strike,
and then in 1905, a couple scientists made the connection that it was crushed magnetically by
the huge currents that passed through it. They estimated that a current of 20
000 amps, along with some melting is what did the pipe in. In order to replicate the effect I
rigged up some pipe with fuses to prevent the pipe from melting all the way through. With each trial,
I made the fuse thicker and thicker, which allowed the pipe to heat more and more with each run.
I was achieving currents of over 40 000 amps and the fuses were detonating in these trials.
Unfortunately, there was no pipe crushing, even when I let the pipe itself pop from the current.
It turns out it was the alternate explanation that was closer to being correct. A later
analysis determined that the rod was actually hit by an unusually powerful super bolt of 150
000 amps with no melting at all. Since the pressure on the pipe is proportional to the
square of the current going through it, that means I'm not even getting close to what's needed at
40 kilo amps. Now if I had a few hundred more car batteries, well then yeah I could I could
pull it off, but for what that would cost I'd rather build a more accurate lightning machine.
As a whole, the engineering for this project was deceivingly complicated. My channel has a history
of circuits that operate much more complex than the schematic would lead you to believe,
and this one takes the cake for that. I mean it's basically the first circuit you would see
in an electronics 101 class. It's just a battery, switch, and resistor. Now of course, there's a
lot more resistances in reality. The cables have resistance, the switch has a resistance, there's
contact resistance, even the batteries themselves have an internal resistance. None of this is easy
to measure without just building the whole circuit and putting a huge amount of current through it.
In the all parallel arrangement I couldn't get past 15 000 amps, and I was really disappointed
by this. Where was the resistance coming from? The battery resistance is negligible here, and it's
not the cables either. I'm using the thickest wire in the American wire gauge system and I'm
running 10 of those in parallel. As a side note, there's no measurement that's more American than
the American wire gauge. Anyway, the resistance was nearly all on the contact points, and rewiring
the bank for 60 volts was able to overcome most of that. In this arrangement, the limiting factor
is the battery internal resistance, which means that most of the circuit power is actually going
into heating the batteries. I scoped the voltage across a bolt when zapping it, and it dropped to
6 volts! yikes. Now the hardest part about this project was actually coming up with a switch. I
mean you can't just buy a switch like this that can disconnect these huge currents, at least for
less than you'd pay for all these batteries. My original intention was to build a solid state
switch using like a huge array of MOSFETs, but I realized that that would probably have a really
high chance of catastrophic failure, so I nerd sniped the members of my Discord server with the
hopes that they would come up with a solution. This was a unique challenge, but I got a lot of
creative ideas ranging from MOSFETs to mechanical devices and even a cursed mercury switch. The
Tesla coil master Greg Leyh suggested something hydraulic, which gave me the idea to modify a log
splitter. I bought a cheap log splitter and some monstrous copper plates and then brought them to
my friend Josh to weld them up. It was his idea to use the internal spring mechanism to switch it on,
which significantly helped keep the switch resistance low when firing. As a side note,
this is the same Josh in my early pyro experiment videos that predate my YouTube channel.
So yeah, thanks to Josh for building the switch, thanks to my Discord nerds for the
engineering consult, and thanks to AnyDesk for both sponsoring this video and giving me the
video idea in the first place. Finally I'd like to give an ode to the lead acid battery. These
things are tough as nails, invented way back in 1859, making them the oldest rechargeable battery
technology. They're also the most recycled consumer product in the US, making them the
most sustainable battery technology. To top it off, they are the preferred source of charge
for electric eels, fulfilling a critical role in aquatic environments. Thanks for watching!