Extreme Fundamentals of Energy

Preface

Since the beginning of the cold war in 1945, nations have had their nuclear weapons at the ready with their backs against the wall. In the United States, our addiction to foreign oil is not only economically unwise but also a matter of national security. It has for many years influenced our foreign policy in which we at times back despot regimes in the hopes of continuing the precious flow of oil. Fossil fuels are in limited supply, nonrenewable, and polluting. Since the industrial revolution, we have been fouling the waters and air of our global environment. High levels of industrial waste products like mercury and lead are finding their way into the oceans and contaminating the fish we consume. Pesticides that are used on our crops are leaching into our drinking water. As our industrial society exhales vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the air because of the burning of fossil fuels, our world may today be at the tipping point leading to an irreversible change in climate. Pollution must be stopped or it can irreparably damage our sources of food, water, and the Earth’s environment. Greenhouse gasses may soon alter our climate to the point that our world may become uninhabitable. When we look at pictures of the Earth taken by our astronauts in space, we see a small beautiful living world in the middle of a great deal of emptiness. Our tiny world is as fragile as it is beautiful. The human species is innately innovative, and as we now approach a fork in the road, we must soon decide which path to take. The wise choice is to act responsibly and use the creativity that we each possess to solve the myriad of problems now facing humankind.

Energy is a fundamental constituent of the universe and responsible for everything in existence. It cannot be created or destroyed, but it must be used wisely. Without having fuel for our mechatronic society, our way of life would grind to a halt. Some home-grown green technology initiatives that have been adopted by governments are only exasperating our problems. Using food staples like soybeans and corn for fuel is causing increased worldwide food costs and adding to the problem of malnutrition. This is especially an issue in developing nations. Due to irresponsible procreation, we are now in the midst of a worldwide population explosion with many people in poverty and nearly 15 % of the planet’s inhabitants undernourished and living with daily hunger. Using our food as a fuel for our machines is not the correct solution to the energy problem. It is a national and global imperative that we develop clean and sustainable energy sources, but first we must thoroughly understand energy. This book looks at energy in a fundamental way. We try to answer questions about the nature of energy and ways to harness it. We examine power generation, and look into emerging innovative technologies.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my students. I learned a great deal from them over the years. I would also like to thank high school guidance counselors and college advisors who help young people understand that careers in science, engineering, and technology are rewarding and fun.

About the author

Bob Dukish has spent 30 years working and teaching in the field of technology. After serving in the military, working as a components engineer, and running a corporation, Bob has taught engineering full-time at the high school and college level for the past 10 years. He has Associate Degrees in Avionic Systems, and in Electronic Engineering Technology, a Bachelors Degree in Physics from Syracuse University, and a Master of Science Degree in Management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has also completed a 24-semester hour graduate level teacher licensure course at Kent State University, and has an Ohio teacher’s license. He is a Senior Certified Technician with the Electronic Technicians Association, holds an FCC license, and is affiliated with many professional and charitable organizations.

Table of contents

Chapter 1. A background on energy and matter.

Section 1.1. The beginning of time and the building blocks

of the universe.

Section 1.2. You are as old as the universe and as young as

a new born baby.

Sections 1.3. Electrostatic interactions.

Section 1.4. How electricity flows.

Chapter 2. Conductors and insulators.

Section 2.1. Conductors.

Section 2.2. Insulators.

Section 2.3. Fuses and circuit breakers.

Chapter 3. Series and parallel conductors.

Section 3.1. Series configurations.

Section 3.2. Parallel circuits.

Chapter 4. Energy, work, and power.

Section 4.1. Energy and work.

Section 4.2. Power.

Chapter 5. Fuel cells, batteries, and engines.

Section 5.1. Primary and secondary cells and batteries.

Section 5.2. The internal combustion engine, and fuel cells.

Chapter 6. Dealing with large and small quantities.

Section 6.1. Scientific notation.

Section 6.2. Engineering notation.

Section 6.3. Accuracy limitations.

Chapter 7. DC circuits.

Section 7.1. Ohm’s law in series circuits.

Section 7.2. Ohm’s law in parallel circuits.

Section 7.3. Watt’s law.

Chapter 8. AC circuits.

Section 8.1. Background information.

Section 8.2. Reactive components.

Section 8.3. Inductive reactance.

Section 8.4. Capacitive reactance.

Section 8.5. Net reactance, impedance, and power factor.

Section 8.6. Resonance.

Chapter 9. The electromagnetic spectrum.

Section 9.1. Categorizing RF signals.

Section 9.2. Categorizing all signals in the electromagnetic

spectrum.

Chapter 10. Power Conversion.

Section 10.1. RF energy transmission.

Section 10.2. AC to AC conversion.

Section 10.3. AC to DC conversion.

Section 10.4. DC to DC conversion.

Chapter 11. Troubleshooting systems and circuits.

Section 11.1. Measurements of voltage, resistance, and

current.

Section 11.2. Testing high frequency signals.

Section 11.3. Troubleshooting systems.

Section 11.4. Troubleshooting circuits.

Chapter 12. Heat generation and air conditioning.

Section 12.1. The need for clean sources of fuel.

Section 12.2. Wood burners.

Section 12.3. Coal burners, oil, and natural gas.

Section 12.4. Air conditioning, refrigeration, and heat pumps.

Section 12.5. Geothermal heating and air conditioning.

Chapter 13. Energy generation.

Section 13.1. The generation of electricity.

Section 13.2. Hydroelectric power.

Section 13.3. Coal fired electricity generation.

Section 13.4. Petroleum and natural gas fueled electricity

generation.

Section 13.5. Nuclear energy.

Chapter 14. Alternative energy generation.

Section 14.1. The generation of alternative energy.

Section 14.2. Solar power.

Section 14.3. Wind power.

Chapter 15. Emerging technologies.

Section 15.1. What’s on the horizon.

Section 15.2 Incremental vs. disruptive radical change.

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Chapter one. A background on energy and matter.

Section 1.1. The beginning of time and the building blocks of the universe.

Since the beginning of humanity, people looked at the earth below and sky above them and tried to reach for a logical understanding of their observations. The most important word in any language is the word why. Being able to ask why sets our species apart from everything else in the universe. All plants and animals solve problems in order to remain in existence, but we humans are inherently driven to reach for an understanding of our circumstances, and our intelligence demands that we find relationships in order to synthesize new knowledge. Because of this ability, we have been able to envision unseen events that occurred long before recorded history, and as in the case of cosmology, long before our world was even born. Through science and modern technology, we can understand events that occurred back to nearly the beginning of time itself.

The Venus flytrap

The dionaea muscipula is a small plant that has a natural habitat in the Carolina area of the United States where it can be found growing in nitrogen poor soil. Through evolution, the plant solved the problem of a lack of nutrients in the soil by developing a complex system to trap and digest insects. The dionaea muscipula is more commonly called the Venus flytrap. Many plants solve problems in order to sustain themselves, such as orienting their leaves toward the sun to maximize energy absorption that is used to create chemical fuel through the process of photosynthesis. Our human need for energy is insatiable, and while we haven’t as yet produced an insect eating machine, our ingenuity has enabled us to deploy systems of solar cells that maximize energy collection by following the daily trek of the sun across the sky. Energy is the most important component to both form and sustain plant and animal life on the Earth. Energy is also a very important part of the universe and can be attributed to having developed all of the material that exists on the ground around us and in the sky above.

The most widely accepted scientific theory is that our universe began with a big bang. While no one can be sure what occurred at the absolute moment of creation, through physical observations and related scientific theory, it is thought that all that now exists started as an infinitely small point some 13.7 billion years ago. The point exploded and the entire contents of the universe began moving outward at a tremendous speed at the instant when time and space came into existence. Today the universe is still expanding in all directions. This was noted through the observations of the astronomer Edwin Hubble. He saw that objects in the universe exhibit a red shift in their light. Light waves behave similarly to audio waves as objects are in motion. The waves bunch up as objects are approaching, and they elongate as objects are receding. You can notice this phenomenon in everyday life as a car or train passes you by, while blowing its horn. This change in the pitch of the sound is called the Doppler Effect. With light rather than sound, instead of a change in pitch, we notice a change in the tint of the light. Light waves emitted from an object that is moving towards you are compressed and tend to have a bluish tint, whereas light waves that are elongated because lighted objects are moving away from you, shift toward the red. Hubble noticed that more distant objects exhibit a greater red shift, so it seems that more distant objects are moving away from us at increased speeds. One theory of cosmology is that the universe is like a giant balloon that is being blown-up, and everything in the universe is on the surface of the large expanding sphere.

The Hubble space telescope

There are many elaborate theories about the things that the universe contains, but our normal interactions are with energy and matter. Energy can best be described as a force capable of doing work, and matter has the attributes of mass and volume. Energy has always seemed to be an intangible concept and more mysterious than matter because energy is an invisible force, whereas matter can be seen and touched. They are interchangeable in that energy can be converted into matter, and matter can be converted into energy. Most of the energy that became matter did so at the beginning of the universe and it takes a great deal of energy to make matter, but it is possible for us to transform matter into energy. Just think of a roaring fire as an example of matter supplying energy in the forms of radiant heat and light. A