What I’ve learned in EGEE :: Energy Educational Reflective Essays

What I’ve learned in EGEE When I was first told in class that I had to write my first essay in EGEE about what I knew about energy, I figured it would be easy. I knew what everyone knew about energy: some comes from the sun, some is used to make machines work, and some is used to make our bodies work. However, after the first four weeks of EGEE I’ve learned more about energy than I learned in four years of high school. I’ve learned definitions of energy, power, and heat to name a few, and I’ve also learned different units of energy and power measurements. The first things we learned in EGEE I thought I already knew, but I only had superficial knowledge about such things energy, heat, and radiation. For example, I thought that energy was simply the ability to work. However I learned that it is the capacity to do work (Kraushaar and Ristinen 8), generating heat, and emitting radiation (lecture 1/9/02). I also learned that the formula for energy is work = force x distance (1/9/02). Heat, we learned, is the ability to change the temperature or phase of a substance; radiation is energy emitted in the form of waves traveling at the speed of light (1/11/02). I always thought that heat was the temperature of something, and radiation was emitted from microwaves and nuclear waste. Now I know more about these things than I did before. I also learned about the units of measurement for energy, power, and temperature. The btu, or British thermal unit, is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit (Kraushaar and Ristinen 13-14) and the Calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius (1/11/02). A joule is the energy unit for the metric system, and 1055 joules = one btu = 0.252 Calories (1/11/02). Also, we learned that one gallon of gasoline is equal to 124,000 btus, one pound of coal is equal to 13,000 btus, and one cubic foot of natural gas is equal to 1,000 btus (1/11/02).