Scribd
Upload
50 views2 pages

2 2 Energy

The document discusses different units of energy. The calorie is defined as the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Calories listed on nutrition labels actually refer to kilocalories, which are equal to 1000 calories. The joule is the fundamental unit of energy, where 1 calorie equals 4.18 joules. A kilowatt hour, which appears on electric bills, refers to 1000 watts of power flowing for 1 hour and can be simplified to 3.6 million joules.

Uploaded by

Thái Nguyễn Quốc
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
50 views2 pages

2 2 Energy

The document discusses different units of energy. The calorie is defined as the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Calories listed on nutrition labels actually refer to kilocalories, which are equal to 1000 calories. The joule is the fundamental unit of energy, where 1 calorie equals 4.18 joules. A kilowatt hour, which appears on electric bills, refers to 1000 watts of power flowing for 1 hour and can be simplified to 3.6 million joules.

Uploaded by

Thái Nguyễn Quốc
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Page 1 of 2

2 - 2 - Units of Energy (5_10) 4/24/14, 7:18 PM


Energy comes in units as well, and
these are going to be a pretty fundamental
currency that we'll be talking about in
this class, so we'll pay special
attention to them.
The fundamental unit of energy,
an amount of energy, the unit that I find
the easiest to envision, is the calorie.
A calorie is the amount of energy that it
takes to warm up one
gram of water by one degree Centigrade.
A gram of water is about a milliliter,
About a centimeter on each side.
About the size of a plump raisin.
If you make that one degree warmer, the
amount
of energy it took to do that is one
calorie.
You see calories on the dietary labels of
food.
And it's kind of weird thing dietary
calories
by convention mean kilo-calories.
A kilo-calorie is a 1,000 calories.
The factor of 1,000 there in your diet
shouldn't throw you off too much I hope.
And then there the energy unit that we
will use most in this class, however, is
joule.
One calorie is equal
to 4.18 joules.
A joule is just a constant times the
calorie.
It's like inches and centimeters.
They're analogous, they're the same
dimension but they are different units.
We'll get some practice at slinging
units around by
trying to deconvolve this very curious
unit
that shows up on our electrical bills, a
kilowatt hour.
So a watt is a rate of energy flow.
It's in units
of joules per second.
So if a joule
is a quantity of energy, a watt is a rate
of flow of that energy.
A kilowatt hour means that we have
1,000
watts of power flowing for a period of one
hour.
But we can simplify this
considerably
because there are time units in here
twice.
I'll show you what I mean.
We can simplify this down just to joules.
First we'll attack this
kilowatt.
A kilowatt is equal to a 1,000 watts.
Now we can cancel the kilowatts.
A Watt is defined as one joule per second.
Now this is kind of a strange looking
fraction because you have a fraction bar
here atop and a fraction bar down there so
Page 2 of 2
2 - 2 - Units of Energy (5_10) 4/24/14, 7:18 PM
we can actually simplify this by writing
second
down here and getting rid of this bit.
That's what this joules per second up on
the
top meant is the second has to go down
below.
And then we've got hours and seconds.
We can cancel those time units, but only
after we get them into the right unit.
We'll say 60 seconds equals
a minute.
The seconds go away, and then 60
minutes equals an hour.
The minutes cancel, so now we just have
hours, and hours.
Both cancel and we are left with the only
unit
remaining is joules, a quantity of energy.
So when you get your electric bill, this
is the quantity of energy that you have
consumed.
But, they're these obtuse units.
We can simplify them to the more
straightforward units of joules.
And the number comes out to be a big one.
There are different ways that you can
write this.
Scientific notation, the way we normally
write it with pencil and paper would be
3.6 times 10 to the sixth power.
That would be sort of short hand
for this 3.6 million written here
in long notation.
So some of the
answers in the exercises in the Coursera
site have large numbers like this.
And it's kind of a hard thing to type out
that many zeros.
You have to count how many there are, and
it doesn't accept notation
like this with a times ten raised to an
exponent.
The way computers express scientific
notation is like this.
3.6E6, means 3.6 times 10 to
the sixth, or
another way that this could be expressed
that would also be valid.
Would be 36E5, because there's no
decimal point here,
then it's 36 plus 5 zeroes like that.

You might also like