(15)  Energy  

"From Stargazers to Starships" home page: ....stargaze/Sintro.htm
Lesson plan home page and index:             ....stargaze/Lintro.htm

• The concept of energy, using a variety of examples and also the analogy between energy and money.

• The conservation of energy in its conversion from one form to another.

• Units of energy--Joule, calorie, also watt and kilowatt-hour.

• The special nature of heat, as the "soft currency" of the energy world.

Terms: Energy (potential, kinetic, conservation of), pendulum, joule, calorie, second law of thermodynamics. (kilojoule, kilocalories)

Stories and extras: The energy content of a candy bar.

Today we will study energy,so we might just as well start by asking--"What is energy?"

Solicit answers; stop if someone says "what it takes to run a machine."

If someone gives the formal definition "ability to do work" ask:
"What then is work?" If the answer is "force times distance" say, that is correct; however, that definition will have to wait until the class has learned what a force is.

We could redefine it as "overcoming resistance over a distance"--for instance, lifting a brick (against gravity) from the floor to the table, or dragging it along the floor (against friction), and then work equals resistance times distance.

Any of these could also be done by a machine, so for a start we will simply say "energy is anything that can run a machine."

--Electricity, if you used electric lights, or a radio, or TV
--Light--that was what the electricity in the lightbulb was converted to
--Sound--that was what the electricity in the radio was converted to
--Chemical energy--when you ate breakfast, it gave you strength.
--Heat--if you cooked your food, or heated the house.
--Nuclear energy--if you enjoyed sunlight, because the Sun gets its energy by combining atomic nuclei of hydrogen to helium, deep inside it.

That energy becomes heat, and heat causes light to come out.
In an electric lightbulb, electricity makes a wire very hot, and that heat is what produces light.

On a bike, the chemical energy of your food is turned to motion, through your muscles. You can build up speed--that is kinetic energy--or you can climb up a hill--that is potential energy.

And you know you can trade one kind against the other: rolling down a hill, you lose height as you gain speed, and that speed helps you get up the next hill (the same in a roller coaster).

gh = v²/2

In the absence of friction, the final speed v is the same no matter how the object came down--sliding down a smooth inclined ramp, or even a roller-coaster track, still gives the same final speed.

[The teacher may note that while the final speed is the same, the time taken to reach bottom isn't.
  For example: sliding down an inclined board like the one used by Galileo, the object gains speed much more slowly, yet the distance it must cover is longer, so that the time required is much longer, too.]

Yes, the sum (gh +v²/2)

You expect a bigger moving body to have more energy--a rolling bowling ball more than a rolling marble. For that reason we must multiply by mass m:

E = mgh + (1/2)mv²

We have not yet defined mass; for the time it is understood to be "the amount of matter in motion," which we can measure by weighing.
Later we will find a way of measuring mass that does not involve gravity.

A note about units. In any calculation in physics, we must always pay close attention to the units we use. If inappropriate units are used, mistakes easily creep in, fulfilling "Murphy's law"--if anything can go wrong, it will.

In all our calculations involving Newtonian mechanics (unless explicitely stated otherwise) the so-called MKS units are used--distances in Meters, masses in Kilograms, time in Seconds, and all derived units based on these three. In those units g = 9.81 and energy comes out in joules. Whenever other units are given, be sure to convert them to MKS!

Work is overcoming resistance over a distance--multiplying the resistance by distance. A mass m (see next lesson) has weight mg, and lifting it a distance h performs work

W = mgh

Joules.

h = 9*0.305 = 2.745 meters, m = 150*0.454 = 68.1 kg. If g = 9.81 m/s², then

W = mgh = 1833.8 joule

Into the potential energy of height.

From the chemical energy of the food you ate. But note (below) that you do not "burn many calories" by climbing one floor, compared to the number you get from food.

  Suppose you have eaten one square of chocolate weighing 4 grams (1/8 of a bar weighing one ounce). The chocolate contains 2 grams cocoa fat, providing 9 calories per gram (typical for fats), and 2 grams sugar, a carbohydrate with 4 calories per gram, for a total of 18 + 8 = 26 calories. These are "kilocalories" of 4180 joule each, so that piece of chocolate has given you the equivalent of 108,680 joules. If your body can convert it to muscle power with an efficiency of 10% = 0.1, you get 10,868 joules of usable work from that piece of candy, enough to climb 10,868/1833.8 or about 6 floors.

Your potential energy of 1833.8 joule is converted to kinetic energy of (1/2)mv² = 34.05 v² . Then v² = 53.856 , v = 7.3387 m/s.

In miles-per hour (1 mile = 1609 meters).

v = 7.3387*3600 = 26,419 meters/hour = 16.4 miles/hour.

Food energy creates body warmth, also powers the many chemical reactions required by life. In addition, the air we breathe out contains moisture (breathe onto a cool mirror to see it!). Energy is needed to convert the water we drink to vapor.

On the table of energy conversions, which form is converted into which:

-- In an electric fan?

Electric to kinetic

Electric to potential.

In principle, yes, the motor can become a generator when turned from the outside. In practice, it is too complicated to return power to the public supply. But we can absorb electric power generated this way, turning it to heat in a resistor, and that way brake the motor.

Electricity to light.

In a diode, electricity is directly converted to light. In a lightbulb, it creates heat, and the heat creates light.

Chemical to electric.

Yes, when the battery is charged.

Heat to kinetic energy. We will later see that the converging-diverging design of the nozzle is very efficient in it.
Has anyone here read or seen "October Sky"? It is a true story of high school boys building and flying rockets, and after they discovered the proper design of the nozzle, their rockets flew much higher.

Limestone is heated over fire in a kiln. It is a compound of calcium, oxygen and carbon dioxide. The heat drives off the carbon dioxide and crumbles the stone to calcium oxide, quicklime, which holds more chemical energy.

For use in mortar, builders slake the quicklime with water. It heats up, returning its chemical energy to heat.

Spacecraft near Earth use solar cells, that convert light to electricity--sort of the inverse effect of a light-emitting diode.

Around the outer planets, sunlight is too dim to provide enough energy in this way. Spacecraft that fly there, e.g. Voyagers 1-2 and Pioneers 10-11, use radioactive sources which generate heat, and thermocouples convert it to electricity.

The Russians experimented with small nuclear reactors on spacecraft. One crashed into a lake in Canada, contaminating it with radioactivity and creating great resentment; no such reactors are flown any more.

Power is the rate at which energy is supplied, measured in watts. One watt is 1 joule/second, 1 kilowatt = 1000 watt.

Energy: 1 kwh = 3,600,000 joule.

Because we usually cannot convert any of it back to other forms.

That one can never convert heat completely back into other forms of energy, some of it is always irrecoverable.

[Optional: The fraction of heat energy which can be converted to other forms depends on the temperature at which the heat is provided.
The unrecovered heat is changed to a lower temperature, and the fraction we recover depends on these two temperatures--the one at which the heat is received, and the one at which the remainder can be dumped.
A power station needs not only a supply of hot steam, but also a way of dumping the heat left at the end of the cycle. Steam locomotives dumped their spent steam into the air, and therefore needed a great amount of of water, carried in their tenders. Electric power stations (of any kind) recycle their steam and cool it with air in cooling towers, like those of 3-mile island which (for some reason) became a symbol of nuclear energy. Other power stations use nearby lakes and rivers to cool and condense their steam, and. steamships (of course!) do so with seawater.]