Question

Car batteries all have something called an Amp Hour Rate. This tells you that a car can put out so many amps for one hour before the battery puts out all of its charge and dies. Your car has a 90 A h battery and you accidentally leave your lights on overnight, so when you come back, the battery is dead. What was the total charge that left the battery? How many electrons made up this charge?

Answer 1

A 90 Ah battery discharges 324,000 coulombs of charge. After calculating the charge of a single electron, it is found that 2.02 x 10^24 electrons have been displaced from the battery.

Step-by-step explanation:

Car batteries are rated in ampere-hours (Ah), which corresponds to the physical quantity of electric charge. The charge in ampere-hours can be calculated by multiplying the current (in amperes) by the time (in hours) the current can be maintained. For a 90 Ah battery that has been completely drained, the total charge that left the battery would be 90 Ah multiplied by the conversion factor of 3600 seconds per hour (since 1 Ah = 3600 coulombs), resulting in a charge of 324,000 coulombs. To find how many electrons make up this charge, we divide the total charge by the charge of a single electron, which is approximately 1.602 x 10^-19 coulombs. Therefore, we would have approximately 2.02 x 10^24 electrons.