In an ordinary household charger, like for a laptop or cellphone, there’ll typically be an LED or some indicator showing it’s on. When you pull the plug, the lamp will fade in a second or two, and the charge that was in the transformer… goes? Goes where? Every now and then I shock myself by touching the pins of the plug right after unplugging, and in those cases the charge exits via me. Where does it go if nothing is touching the pins?
Either in a bleeder resistor, or dissipated in other resistive elements in the circuit (or load). Capacitors can store charge for quite a long time (hours or longer, sometimes much longer) if there is no mechanism to bleed off charge.
What Arjuna34 said, except to add that the energy ends up being dissipated as heat.
>What Arjuna34 said, except to add that the energy ends up being dissipated as heat.
What Mangetout said, except to add that a fair portion of the energy could end up being dissipated as light, if you’re watching the LED get dimmer. LED’s usually run on around 0.02 amps or less, plenty for discharging a little capacitor.
The energy “in the transformer” literally is magnetic, and it rapidly turns into current in the winding to try to maintain whatever current was last flowing, even if that means going to a high voltage. Maybe this takes 0.01 seconds, probably less. That’s how ignition coils in cars generate high voltage for spark plugs. Or at least it used to, when I understood how cars worked. They probably use hyperlinks or nanoparticles or something instead of voltage now…
Much of which itself will soon wind up as heat.
>Much of which itself will soon wind up as heat.
Come on! You were supposed to start with “What Napier said, except…”
Unless, of course, it wasn’t funny…