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How Does Vaping Work?

How do vaping devices work?

It’s difficult to overstate what vaping has done for the smokers of the world over recent years. Millions of smokers have been able to quit their habits thanks to vaping.

The pharmaceutical companies of the world have created one smoking cessation product after another over the years, and none of those products have come anywhere near achieveing the success rate of vaping. For some people, it’s enough to know that an e-cigarette just works. You puff on the device, and you enjoy a tasty cloud of vapour that also supplies nicotine to your body.

For others, though, it’s no fun to use a gadget and not know how it works. You may have a basic idea of how your computer and mobile phone work, and you can fix most of the things that go wrong with those devices. If you feel that the same should be true of your vaping device, this is the article for you. You’re about to learn how vaping actually works.

Battery and Circuitry

So how does a vape work? A vaping device uses a heating element to boil e-liquid, turning it into vapour that you can inhale. For that to happen, the device needs power, and it gets that power from one or more lithium-ion batteries.

The battery in your vaping device is responsible for sending power to the atomizer coil to vaporize the e-liquid. In addition, your device has battery management circuitry that’s responsible for charging the cells and ensuring that their voltage is never allowed to go too high or too low.

What you may not realise is that a dual-battery vaping device stores about the same amount of power as a notebook computer. While a computer can run on battery power all day, though, a vaping device actually spends most of its time idle.

You’ll get somewhere in the neighbourhood of 150 puffs out of a dual-battery device before it’s time to recharge it, and at an average length of about three seconds per puff, that means you’re only getting a few minutes of active use out of your vaping device between battery charges. That’s a huge power draw.

Integrated Circuit, Firmware and Power Regulation Circuitry

Aside from mechanical mods – which have no electronic components and are outside the scope of this article – all vaping devices have integrated circuits and firmware controlling their operation. Effectively, that means a vaping device is like a computer on a small scale.

The device’s integrated circuit and firmware control what happens when you press the device’s fire button. The power regulation circuitry either boosts or reduces the voltage coming from the battery in order to output the correct wattage to the atomizer coil. In addition to managing power delivery and providing the interface that you use to control your vaping device, the integrated circuit and firmware also perform the crucial function of ensuring that you can vape safely without causing the battery to overheat.

As mentioned above, a vape battery stores an incredible amount of energy in a tiny package. A short circuit or thermal emergency would be an extremely dangerous event, so your vaping device has built-in safety measures to help prevent those things from happening. The typical safety features of a vaping device include:

  • Checking for short circuits.
  • Monitoring the internal temperature of the vaping device.
  • Ensuring that the device’s output current doesn’t exceed the battery’s capabilities.
  • Shutting the device down when the battery’s voltage is too low.
  • Stopping the charging cycle when the battery has reached its maximum voltage.

Tank And Atomizer Coil

A vape tank is actually a pretty ingenious invention because it has multiple holes – holes for air to enter at the bottom and a hole for vapour to exit at the top – and yet, it can somehow hold several millilitres of e-liquid without leaking.

A vape tank prevents leaking by using several silicone gaskets to prevent the e-liquid from coming out. The tank also maintains an internal vacuum that helps to prevent the e-liquid from seeping out through the atomizer coil. The atomizer coil in a vape tank has a densely packed cotton wick that keeps e-liquid in close contact with the coil’s heating surface and manages the flow of liquid throughout the tank.

Here’s how it works.

  1. When you press the fire button on your vaping device, the heating surface in the atomizer coil vaporizes the e-liquid held in the wick.
  2. The wick is dry when you finish your puff, so it then absorbs more e-liquid from the tank. The level of e-liquid in the tank decreases slightly.
  3. When the tank begins to get low, you add more e-liquid. The cycle continues until you open the tank to replace the atomizer coil.

The E-Liquid

When talking about how a vape works, the last component that makes your vaping device function is the e-liquid.

Vape juice generally contains nicotine, which is obviously the point of vaping for most people. Vaping replaces the nicotine that you would get from smoking. Since you absorb the nicotine via inhalation, vaping is as satisfying as smoking. That’s why it has enabled so many vapers to stop using tobacco products.

E-liquid also contains flavours, which helps to reinforce the enjoyment you derive from vaping. Objectively, e-liquid is dramatically tastier than cigarette smoke, and that helps to make quitting easier. Nicotine and flavours are both highly concentrated substances in their original forms, so an e-liquid also needs a carrier to dilute those substances and create a usable product. In most e-liquids, the carrier is a blend of propylene glycol (PG) and vegetable glycerine (VG).

In a typical bottle of e-liquid around 90-95 percent of the content is the carrier – not the nicotine and flavours. The carrier creates the clouds that you see when you vape. Adjusting the ratio of the two carrier liquids can dramatically change the performance of the e-liquid. That’s why a bottle of e-liquid usually has its VG/PG ratio printed on the label.

The higher the ratio of VG, the greater the vapour that will be produced but high VG e-liquids require the use of low resistance coils that reach higher temperatures.

In Summery

Vaping devices are surprisingly complex gadgets and yet are designed to be incredibly easy to use. You don't need to understand the finer details of how the devices work in order the enjoy the benefits that they deliver. But if your curiosity has inspired you to read this page, hopefully you now better understand what's going on inside your vape.

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