100 car batteries wired in parallel!

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 pl

aying 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 m

ake  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 pr

ess 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 pro

bably 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 cu

rrent 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 th

at 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 be

ing 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  loo

king 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  a

cross 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 b

atteries 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 z

inc 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 consequen

ces 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  blow

ing 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 t

hat'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 coppe

r 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 oka

y 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 an

d 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 th

e 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 a

round 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 curren

t 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 b

olt 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 me

lted 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 vis

ualize 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 he

re 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  o

nly 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 h

ad 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 tr

ipped 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 m

elt 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 ex

ample, 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 light

ning 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 t

his 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 w

ould 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 cu

rrent 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 re

wiring 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 le

ss 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 G

reg 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 th

e  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 so

urce of charge for electric eels, fulfilling a critical role  in aquatic environments. Thanks for watching!