Exothermic welding

Okay kiddo, have you ever played with playdough? When you squeeze it in your hands, it gets warm, right? Well, that's because of heat from your hands moving into the playdough.

Exothermic welding works in a similar way, but instead of using playdough and your hands, we use special materials and electricity. You see, metals that we use for things like electrical wires need to be connected together so that electricity can flow from one to the other.

Exothermic welding helps us make those connections stronger and more reliable. We start by putting two pieces of metal next to each other and then we pour a special powder around them. This powder is made of different chemicals that react when they get hot.

Next, we use a special tool to send a big electric current through the powder. The electricity heats up the powder really quickly, kind of like your hands warming up the playdough. The chemicals inside the powder react with each other and create a spark. The spark gets so hot that it melts the metal wires and the powder around them.

And voila! The metal wires are now fused together in a super strong bond that won't come apart easily. This method is called exothermic welding because it creates heat (exo = out) and releases it into the surroundings.

So, it's like mixing a special powder with wires and using electricity to make them so hot that they melt together into one piece. It's like baking a cake but instead of not touching the metal pan, the metal pan kind of melts together into one piece. Pretty cool, huh?