Month: April 1997

How much steam is required to produce a unit of power?

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How much steam is required to produce a unit of power? — DKB, Dubai

There is no easy answer to this question, but for an interesting reason. First, “power” is a measure of energy per time (e.g. joules per second or BTUs per hour) so any answer would have to involve the amount of steam per time (e.g. kilograms per second or cubic meters per hour). But even recognizing that requirement, I can’t answer the question. First, I’d need to know the temperature of the steam. The hotter the steam, the more thermal energy it contains and the more energy it could provide. For more complicated reasons, I’d also have to know the pressure of the steam. But there is a fourth issue: even knowing the amount of steam involved and the temperature and pressure of that steam, the amount of useful energy that can be extracted from that steam depends on the existence of a colder object. You can’t turn thermal energy—the type of energy that steam contains—directly into useful work or into electric energy in a continuous manner. You must use the steam in a “heat engine”, converting a fraction of its thermal energy into work as that thermal energy flows as heat from the hot steam to a colder object. This requirement is established by the laws of thermodynamics and there is no way to get around it. The hotter the steam and the colder the object, the larger the fraction of the steam’s thermal energy you can convert to work. However, there is no way to convert all of the steam’s thermal energy into work continuously.

How does a standard water pump work?

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How does a standard water pump work? — ML, Wilmington, NC

The water pumps in most cars are centrifugal pumps. These pumps work by spinning water around in a circle inside a cylindrical pump housing. The pump makes the water spin by pushing it with an impeller. The blades of this impeller project outward from an axle like the arms of turnstile and, as the impeller spins, the water spins with it. As the water spins, the pressure near the outer edge of the pump housing becomes much higher than near the center of the impeller. There are many ways to understand this rise in pressure, and here are two:

First, you can view the water between the impeller blades as an object traveling in a circle. Objects don’t naturally travel in a circle—they need an inward force to cause them to accelerate inward as they spin. Without such an inward force, an object will travel in a straight line and won’t complete the circle. In a centrifugal pump, that inward force is provided by high-pressure water near the outer edge of the pump housing. The water at the edge of the pump pushes inward on the water between the impeller blades and makes it possible for that water to travel in a circle. The water pressure at the edge of the turning impeller rises until it’s able to keep water circling with the impeller blades.

You can also view the water as an incompressible fluid, one that obeys Bernoulli’s equation in the appropriate contexts. As water drifts outward between the impeller blades of the pump, it must move faster and faster because its circular path is getting larger and larger. The impeller blades do work on the water so it moves faster and faster. By the time the water has reached the outer edge of the impeller, it’s moving quite fast. But when the water leaves the impeller and arrives at the outer edge of the cylindrical pump housing, it slows down. Here is where Bernoulli’s equation figures in. As the water slows down and its kinetic energy decreases, that water’s pressure potential energy increases (to conserve energy). Thus the slowing is accompanied by a pressure rise. That’s why the water pressure at the outer edge of the pump housing is higher than the water pressure near the center of the impeller.

When water is actively flowing through the pump, arriving through a hole near the center of the impeller and leaving through a hole near the outer edge of the pump housing, the pressure rise between center and edge of the pump isn’t as large. However, this pressure rise never completely disappears and it’s what propels the water through the car’s cooling system.

If one accepts the existence of black holes, would it be plausible to assume tha…

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If one accepts the existence of black holes, would it be plausible to assume that a “white hole” exists on the opposite end due to captured light by the black hole?

I think not. Depending on your frame of reference, the passage of material into a simple black hole—one that isn’t spinning very fast and that doesn’t have a great deal of electric charge in it—has one of two results. If you are traveling with the material, things proceed more or less normally as you pass the point of no return—the so-called “event horizon” from which even light can’t escape. You accompany the material all the way to the center of the black hole—its “singularity”—and are crushed to infinite density. If instead of traveling with the material, you remain outside the black hole looking in toward it, you see the material approach the event horizon but without ever quite entering its surface. In fact, all of the material that went into forming the black hole in the first place, plus all the material that has fallen into the black hole since its formation, appear to reside forever on the event horizon surface. In effect, the material never quite gets to the black hole. Since the material never quite gets to the black hole, there is no need for it to reemerge elsewhere from a “white hole.”

However, there are more complicated black holes—ones involving angular momentum and electric charge—that have more complicated structures. In falling into one of these black holes, it is apparently possible to miss the singularity. There is some discussion of such material reemerging from the “other end” of one of this black holes but I believe that there are serious problems with such two-ended interpretations of the equations governing such black holes.

What type of laser is in a laser printer?

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What type of laser is in a laser printer? — DFC, Asheville, NC

A laser printer uses a single diode laser that’s scanned across the surface of the photoconductor drum by a rapidly turning, multifaceted mirror. These diode lasers are very similar the ones used in laser pointers or supermarket barcode readers. The multifaceted mirrors are typically octagonal prisms that are aluminized to make them highly reflecting and spun by a motor. The laser beam bounces off the spinning mirror and its reflection sweeps across the photoconductor. Modulating the current supplying power to the diode laser causes its brightness to fluctuate so that it writes information on the surface of the photoconductor.

What are atoms made of?

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What are atoms made of? — Fifth Grade Class, Knifley, KY

My answer to that question depends on the level of detail you’re interested in. As an example of what I mean by that statement, imagine describing what a simple house is made of. At the coarsest level, you might say that it consists of a floor, a ceiling, four walls, and a roof. At a greater level of detail, you might say that it consists of many boards, some tarpaper, and lots of nails. At a still finer level of detail, you might say that it consists of atoms and molecules, and… you get the point. So it is with atoms. I’ll answer the question at a fairly coarse level of detail, one that’s familiar to many people, and then say a word or two about the next level of detail.

The principal constituents of an atom are protons, neutrons, and electrons. These are three most important subatomic particles; the main building blocks of matter in the same way that wood, bricks, and steel are the major building blocks of houses. Each of these particles has a mass—the measure of their inertia—and two of them, electrons and protons, are electrically charged. Each electron has one unit of negative charge while each proton has one unit of positive charge. Because an atom is normally electrically neutral—its positive and negative charges must balance—it has an equal number of electrons and protons. The number of neutrons in an atom is somewhat flexible.

These particles, electrons, protons, and neutrons, are held together by several types of forces. The protons and neutrons, which are relatively massive, stick to one another at the center of the atom and form a dense object called the atomic nucleus. The particles in the nucleus are held together by the “nuclear” force, which binds together protons and neutrons that are touching one another. This nuclear force is quite strong and is able to overcome the strongly repulsive electromagnetic forces that the protons in the nucleus exert on one another—like electric charges repel one another and the protons are all positively charged. The electrons circulate around the atom’s nucleus, held in place by the strongly attractive electromagnetic forces that protons exert on electrons—opposite electric charges attract one another and the electrons are negatively charged while the protons are positively charged.

The electrons do most of the circulating around the nucleus, rather than the other way around, because they are much less massive than the nucleus. As with the planets around the sun, the less massive objects tend to orbit the more massive objects. At a basic level, you can view an atom as a tiny solar system with its neutrons and protons at the center and its electrons orbiting around this central nucleus. Quantum physics dramatically complicates this picture, but it’s a helpful picture nonetheless.

At the next level of detail, the protons and neutrons themselves have structure—they are built out of yet smaller particles known as quarks. The particles also stick to one another by tossing particles back and forth—particles including photons and gluons. But that is a whole new story.

What is sonar?

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What is sonar? — BK, Australia

Sonar stands for “sound navigation ranging” and involves the bouncing of sound waves from objects to determine where those objects are. It’s based on the reflection of sound waves from objects. Whenever a wave of any sort moves from one medium to another and experiences a change in speed (or more generally, a change in impedance), part of that wave reflects. Because sound travels much faster in solids than it does in air, some sound reflects when it moves from air to rock—which is why you hear echoes when you yell at a mountain! But even more subtle changes in the speed of sound will cause modest reflections. Thus a sophisticated sound generator and receiver can detect objects immersed in water or buried in the ground. Another form of sonar is used in medical imaging—ultrasonic imaging.

Why and how does water conduct electricity?

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Why and how does water conduct electricity? — SM, Murrysville, PA

Water molecules are electrically neutral and do not accelerate in response to electric fields. For that reason, a liquid consisting only of water molecules wouldn’t conduct electricity. However, real water contains things other than water molecules. Even in completely pure water, about 1 in every 10,000,000 water molecules is found to have dissociated into a hydrogen ion (H+) and a hydroxide ion (OH–). These electrically charged ions do accelerate in response to electric fields and they make it possible for even the purest water to conduct electricity weakly. Adding impurities, particularly ionic impurities such as salts, makes water an even better conductor of electricity.

I understand that for a steam engine to produce useful work, you need a differen…

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I understand that for a steam engine to produce useful work, you need a difference in temperatures. My question is whether the difference in temperatures between cold glacier ice and the warmer air could be used to drive a steam engine and generate electricity. — LNH & AJH, Juneau, Alaska

As you clearly recognize, any heat engine—a machine that converts thermal energy into work—can only do its job while heat is flowing from a hotter object to a colder object. That limitation is imposed by the second law of thermodynamics—a statistical law that observes that the disorder of an isolated system can never decrease. A heat engine’s theoretical efficiency at turning thermal energy into work improves as the temperature difference between its hotter and colder objects increases. Since the air temperature is hotter than the glacier temperature, there is the possibility to convert some of the air’s thermal energy into work as heat flows from the air to the glacier. In short, what you suggest could be done.

Unfortunately, most practical heat engines work best when the hotter object is really hot. For example, a steam engine works best when the hotter object is hot enough to produce very high temperature, high pressure steam. To operate a steam engine with outside air as the hotter object and cold ice as the colder object, the steam engine would have to operate at very low pressure. In fact, it would operate well below atmospheric pressure in a carefully sealed environment. Steam might not even be the best choice for a working fluid—you might do better with a refrigerant such as the various Freon replacements. In effect, your heat engine would be an air conditioner run backward—providing electric power rather than consuming it. Although this could be done, it would probably not be cost effective. The heat exchangers needed to obtain heat from the air and to deliver most of that heat to the glacier, as well as all the machinery of the heat engine itself, would probably make the electricity you generated too expensive. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean that it’s worth doing. Until other sources of energy become more expensive, this one won’t pay for itself.

How might an ion engine work?

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How might an ion engine work? — DAA, San Diego, CA

One possible ion engine uses mercury as a propellant. The mercury starts as a liquid in a small tank, but its atoms slowly evaporate to form a low-density gas. An electric discharge through this gas, such as occurs inside a fluorescent lamp, knocks electrons off some of the mercury atoms. When a mercury atom loses an electron, it becomes a positively charged mercury ion and can be accelerated from the discharge by electric fields. In the ion propulsion engine, an electric field extracts and accelerates the mercury ions toward a hole in the side of a spaceship. The mercury ions are ejected into space at enormous speeds. As they accelerate, the mercury ions exert reaction forces on the engine and these forces are what propel the spaceship forward. Overall, the mercury ions accelerate in one direction while the spaceship accelerates in the other direction. To keep the spaceship electrically neutral, the engine also ejects electrons into space. However, mercury ions provide most of the engine’s thrust.

What is the general theory of operation of a hydraulic turbine?

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What is the general theory of operation of a hydraulic turbine? — GS, Fort Worth, Texas

A hydraulic turbine is essentially a fan run backward—while a fan adds energy to a passing fluid, a turbine extracts energy from a passing fluid. You can think of the fluid’s effects on the turbine blades in two different but equivalent ways. In one view, the fluid is deflected by its encounter with the canted turbine blades and as the blades push the fluid in one direction, the fluid pushes the blades in the opposite direction. This reaction force that the fluid exerts on the blades causes those blades to spin and does work on them—energy is transferred from the fluid to the blades.

In the other view, the blades “fly” through the fluid like the wings of an airplane. The fluid flow around each blade is such that the pressure is higher on one side of the blade than the other and the blade experiences a net force toward the lower pressure side. The blades move in the direction of this force, so the passing fluid does work on them—energy is transferred from the fluid to the blades.

These two views are completely equivalent. The fluid leaves the turbine blades traveling more slowly or at lower pressure, and it acquires a rotation in the direction opposite the turbine’s rotation.