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In Iron Man 3 movie, I saw that Mark 42 suit was being recharged with domestic electricity. And within less than a day, it was ready for action.

How much power does Iron Man's Mark 42 suit really need?

user931
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According to the Iron Man Wikia (based on details found on the "official JARVIS iPhone App) The Mark 42 "Prehensile" Suit is made from;

"An advanced titanium alloy that can resist powerful attacks, including energy attacks, that can destroy normal materials. It is reinforced with silicon infused-steel, enhanced composite armor with ceramic plating, a fiberglass frame and an advanced titanium alloy with high durability, hardness, compressive and tensile strength"

It also incorporates the Mark 33's energy enhancement technology which projects a slight forcefield that enhances the armor and improves durability greatly"

enter image description here

In the film Iron Man 3, when the Mark 42's battery falls below a charge of 5% the main systems (engines, computers, AI) all fail pretty much simultaneously. After approximate 8-12 hours of continual charging off of a 110v plug socket (and a further 1 hour charging off a boat's generator) the suit is combat ready at 92% charge. It's able to survive until the end of the film without the need to recharge further. Since the maximum wattage you can normally get from a normal US household outlet is 2400W then multiplying this by 9-13 hours shows that 21.6-31.2 kWh is clearly the amount of energy needed to charge the suit.

That said, in the film Iron Man 1, Tony Stark states that his chest reactor is capable of generating 3 gigajoules per second

Yinsen: What will it generate?

Tony Stark: If my math is right - and it always is - three gigajoules per second.

Since 3 Gigajoules per second is equivalent to 3 Gigawatts (over a million times more power than could be drawn from a standard electrical outlet) it would suggest that he's made vast improvements in suit power efficiency between Mark 1 and Mark 42.

Furthermore we can assume that the long-distance flight carrying Stark (2000+ miles travelling subsonically at approx 700MPH?) was the major drain on the power capabilities of the suit since it operates at full efficiency despite performing the same feats that drained it originally.

Nolimon
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Valorum
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  • Only your second paragraph seems to directly address the question. Could you perhaps shift the focus to it, and elaborate some more on the calculations? – Avner Shahar-Kashtan Dec 30 '13 at 10:40
  • I thought that I also read that his suits are made from a very similar type of Vibranium as Captain Americas shield is.. that is why Tony is so confident in his suits armor that he doesn't even fear being point blank to a nuclear explosion. Also, in the first Iron Man, he told Yensen that the first mini Arc reactor could put out 3 gigajules per second of power, which is 4 million horsepower or enough to run 15 aircraft carriers, so it should have far more than enough power to go along for months or years without needing a charge. I believe the charge is backup power just in case he needs extra – JediWitness Dec 30 '13 at 10:56
  • @ JediWitness, Tony can't build his suit out of Vibranium because almost available stocks of the ore have been used to create Captain America's shield with the remainder used in Tony Stark's chest reactor; http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/43723/why-didnt-iron-man-make-a-vibranium-armor – Valorum Dec 30 '13 at 10:57
  • @ Avner, I've expanded on the disparity between the power requirements in the film(s) and included some additional calculations. – Valorum Dec 30 '13 at 12:51
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    Your maths is faulty. A Watt is a Joule per second. How can J/s be equivalent to J/s/h? Three Gigajoules per second is simply three Gigawatts. – OrangeDog Oct 07 '15 at 11:27
  • @orangedog - You are, of course correct. Amended accordingly. – Valorum Oct 07 '15 at 11:50
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    No, that still makes no sense. Watts is a measure of power. Watthours is a measure of energy. Watts per hour is a measure of nothing useful. Eight hours on a 2400W socket would be 19kWh. – OrangeDog Oct 07 '15 at 11:53
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    Bear in mind that the Mk 1 chest piece was less powerful than later models, and was unable to fully power the Mk 3 (?) suit for more than 15-30 minutes. So the subsequent improvements to power efficiency in later suits is probably even greater than originally suspected. – Xantec Oct 07 '15 at 17:01
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    ugh 3 gigajoules per second is 3 gigawatts – Jon Acosto Mar 12 '16 at 06:23
  • @JonAcosto Yes, per second. One joule is equivalent to the power required to generate one watt of energy for one second. So in an hour, that'd be 10,800 Gigawatts. The "per second" part on the Gigajoules figures is indeed redundant, though as joules are already a 'per second' unit of measurement when speaking in terms of watts. – TylerH Feb 05 '18 at 15:22
  • @TylerH - Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is no “watt of energy,” since watts are a unit of power. – Adamant Apr 12 '18 at 09:13
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    Valorum, this answer needs to be edited. I’ve taken the liberty of correcting your units. It turns out that 3 gigawatts (3 billion watts) is indeed about a million times the power of an outlet (around 1800 or 2400 watts), so that part doesn’t need to be corrected. – Adamant Apr 12 '18 at 09:19
  • Anyway, even my electric car takes days to get a full charge from a wall outlet. – Adamant Apr 12 '18 at 09:23
  • @adamant - I looked it up and I'm pretty happy with the way I've expressed it. 1GW doesn't equal 1 GJ/H – Valorum Apr 12 '18 at 09:50
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    @Valorum - Do you understand how the units work? A gigawatt is a gigajoule per second, not per hour. But more to the point, this line is flat-out wrong: “3 Gigajoules per second is equivalent to over 10,000 Gigawatts per hour.” Units of joules: Energy. Units of watts: Energy per time. So, units of gigajoules per second: energy/time. Units of gigawatts per hour: energy/(time)^2. Do you see why these are incomparable quantities? – Adamant Apr 12 '18 at 10:37
  • @Adamant - Find me an expert. – Valorum Apr 12 '18 at 10:46
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    @Valorum - I am a physicist. I am the expert. If you can get it touch with Praxis, they’ll say the same thing. I’m trying to make a Word document that will make things more clear, I hope. – Adamant Apr 12 '18 at 10:46
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    Here you go. Hopefully this will make things more clear. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P7wSGx5RaUAR014mpdq0J-VYvvwO3rAw/view?usp=sharing. Open it with Word or Google Docs to see the math notation. Anyway, there’s a reason for all the upvotes on the comments correcting this answer. – Adamant Apr 12 '18 at 11:19
  • Unless I overlooked it, the link you used for the maximum wattage in a US household gives a value for a 240V system, which is not what the US uses; the US uses 110V if I'm not mistaken. – SQB Apr 12 '18 at 12:21
  • Anyway, going by the 2.4 kW you quote, charging the suit from that for 12 hours would yield 28.8 kWh, which equals to a bit over 0.1 GJ. If his suit needs that 3 GJ/s (3 GW) — which isn't stated, just that the power source can provide it — that would give him about 35 ms of use. – SQB Apr 12 '18 at 12:27
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    @Adamant "all the upvotes" 3 upvotes is literally nothing on a site where "RTFM" questions get upvotes in the triple digits. But yes I mistyped earlier when I said energy; I confused watts with watthours. Pretty much nobody outside of the people who set these standards gets these things correct. Joules, amps, watts, watthours, volts... it's like they designed it to be obtuse. At any rate, you have 70k+ rep here; if you as a SME see a problem with some math notation in an answer, make an edit. Discussing it ad nauseam in the comments is a little useless. – TylerH Apr 12 '18 at 14:27
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    @TylerH - Look at the edit history. – Adamant Apr 12 '18 at 14:32
  • Anyway, sorry for being a little harsh, @Valorum. As TylerH says, it is a subtle distinction. – Adamant Apr 12 '18 at 14:39
  • @Adamant Ah, I didn't see that Valorum had rolled the edit back recently. Subtle distinctions aside, 3 gigawatts vs 10,000 gigawatts is a huge difference that should be fixed. – TylerH Apr 12 '18 at 14:52
  • 3 gigajoules is 833.33kWh. – Jeremy Johnstone Dec 18 '18 at 01:12