Thermal Engineering_ Energy

An energy transfer to or from a closed system is heat if it is caused by a

temperature difference. Otherwise it is work, and it is caused by a force
acting through a distance.
Conservation of energy principle: energy cannot be created or destroyed
during a process; it can only change from one form to another.
Consider a room whose door and windows are tightly closed, and whose
walls are well-insulated so that heat loss or gain through the walls is negligible.
Now lets place a refrigerator in the middle of the room with its door open, and
plug it into a wall outlet. Now, what do you think will happen to the average
temperature of air in the room? Will it be increasing or decreasing? Or will it
remain constant?
If we take the entire roomincluding the air and the refrigeratoras the
system, which is an adiabatic closed system since the room is well-sealed and
well-insulated, and apply conservation of energy principle, the only energy
interaction involved is the electrical energy crossing the system boundary and
entering the room. The conservation of energy requires the energy content of the
room to increase by an amount equal to the amount of the electrical energy
drawn by the refrigerator, which can be measured by an ordinary electric meter.
The refrigerator or its motor does not store this energy. Therefore, this energy
must now be in the room air, and it will manifest itself as a rise in the air
temperature.
Note that energy is conserved during the process of operating the
refrigerator placed in a roomthe electrical energy is converted into an
equivalent amount of thermal energy stored in the room air. If energy is already
conserved, then what are all those speeches on energy conservation and the
measures taken to conserve energy? Actually, by energy conservation what is
meant is the conservation of the quality of energy, not the quantity. Electricity,
which is of the highest quality of energy, for example, can always be converted
to an equal amount of thermal energy (also called heat). But only a small
fraction of thermal energy, which is the lowest quality of energy, can be
converted back to electricity.
Energy:
Energy can exist in numerous forms such as thermal, mechanical, kinetic,
potential, electric, magnetic, chemical, and nuclear, and their sum constitutes

the total energy E of a system. The total energy of a system on a unit mass
basis is denoted by e.
In thermodynamic analysis, it is often helpful to consider the various
forms of energy that make up the total energy of a system in two groups:
macroscopic and microscopic. The macroscopic forms of energy are those a
system possesses as a whole with respect to some outside reference frame, such
as kinetic and potential energies. The microscopic forms of energy are those
related to the molecular structure of a system and the degree of the molecular
activity, and they are independent of outside reference frames. The sum of all
the microscopic forms of energy is called the internal energy of a system and
is denoted by U.
The energy that a system possesses as a result of its motion relative to
some reference frame is called kinetic energy (KE). When all parts of a system
move with the same velocity, the kinetic energy is expressed as
2

m. v
KE=
J
2

Kinetic energy per unit mass (on unit mass basis) is

ke=

v2
J / kg
2

The energy that a system possesses as a result of its elevation in a

gravitational field is called potential energy (PE) and is expressed as
PE=mgz

Kinetic energy per unit mass (on unit mass basis) is

pe=gz J /kg

where g is the gravitational acceleration and z is the elevation of the center of

gravity of a system relative to some arbitrarily selected reference level.
The magnetic, electric, and surface tension effects are significant in some
specialized cases only and are usually ignored. In the absence of such effects,
the total energy of a system consists of the kinetic, potential, and internal
energies and is expressed as
2

E=U + KE+PE=U +

m. v
+mgz
2

Total Energy per unit mass is expresses as

v2
e=u+ ke+ pe=u+ + gz
2

Control volumes typically involve fluid flow for long periods of time, and
it is convenient to express the energy flow associated with a fluid stream in the
rate form. This is done by incorporating the mass flow rate , which is the
amount of mass flowing through a cross section per unit time. It is related to the

volume flow rate V , which is the volume of a fluid flowing through a cross

section per unit time, by

V = A v
m=
c

Internal Energy
Internal energy is defined earlier as the sum of all the microscopic
forms of energy of a system. It is related to the molecular structure and the
degree of molecular activity and can be viewed as the sum of the kinetic and
potential energies of the molecules.
The molecules of a gas move through space with some velocity, and thus
possess some kinetic energy. This is known as the translational energy. The
atoms of polyatomic molecules rotate about an axis, and the energy associated
with this rotation is the rotational kinetic energy. The atoms of a polyatomic
molecule may also vibrate about their common center of mass, and the energy
associated with this back-and-forth motion is the vibrational kinetic energy. For
gases, the kinetic energy is mostly due to translational and rotational motions,
with vibrational motion becoming significant at higher temperatures. The
portion of the internal energy of a system associated with the kinetic energies
of the molecules is called the sensible energy.
The forces that bind the molecules to each other are, as one would expect,
strongest in solids and weakest in gases. If sufficient energy is added to the
molecules of a solid or liquid, the molecules overcome these molecular forces
and break away, turning the substance into a gas. This is a phase-change
process. Because of this added energy, a system in the gas phase is at a higher
internal energy level than it is in the solid or the liquid phase. The internal
energy associated with the phase of a system is called the latent energy. The
phase-change process can occur without a change in the chemical composition
of a system.

The internal energy associated with the atomic bonds in a molecule is

called chemical energy.
The nuclear forces are much larger than the forces that bind the electrons
to the nucleus. The tremendous amount of energy associated with the strong
bonds within the nucleus of the atom itself is called nuclear energy.