How Smoke Detectors Work

Name: How Smoke Detectors Work
Uploaded: 2011-03-16T14:41:01.000Z
Description: Once again we turn to Bill, the “Engineer Guy,” to explain how the world works. This time? Smoke detectors. It turns out, a miniscule piece of radioactive material, Americium, works in conjunction with a special integrated circuit, called a MOSFET (or Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor).

Once again we turn to Bill, the “Engineer Guy,” to explain how the world works. This time? Smoke detectors. It turns out, a miniscule piece of radioactive material, Americium, works in conjunction with a special integrated circuit, called a MOSFET (or Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor).

Mar 16, 2011

Once again we turn to Bill, the “Engineer Guy,” to explain how the world works. This time? Smoke detectors.

It turns out, a miniscule piece of radioactive material, Americium, works in conjunction with a special integrated circuit, called a MOSFET (or Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor). It can detect a change in current as small as 100 pico Amps. This change is what ends up setting off the alarm.

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