Comparing Energy and Heat Units !! (Intro to Dimensional Analysis)
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Module 1, Lesson 2 Comparing Energy and Heat Units !! (Intro to Dimensional Analysis) Objective: By the end of this lesson you will be able to convert between the various units of heat energy commonly used, and make meaningful comparisons between energy usage. You will find that many things become apparent when appropriate units are used. You will also become familiar with the idea of dimensional analysis, one of the most powerful tools in a physicists toolkit. 1. Energy Cost Comparison 1.1 Apples and Oranges In Vancouver BC, energy to power our lives comes in three major forms: natural gas to heat our home, electricity to light it and run appliances (mostly from hydro-electric dams), and oil in the form of the gasoline that we put in out cars. Natural gas is sold by the GJ, electricity by the kWh, and gasoline by the litre. The unit costs we pay in Vancouver are, approximately (as of June 2010, in $CDN, which today is almost the same as the $US): Natural gas: $15/GJ Electricity: $0.06/kWh Gasoline: $1.15/L These are all sources of energy, but we use different units to measure our consumption of them. As they are now comparing them is comparing apples to oranges. Let's compare apples with apples and compare the costs in terms of $/J and $/tonne CO2. Natural gas is already sold in units of dollars per joule, so we will look at electricity first. Electricity is solve in units of kilowatt hours (kWh). Kilowatt hours are a strange unit. At first you think they’re a unit of power because they contain watts, which is energy per unit time. But then the watts are multiplied by hours, which is a unit of time. All told, the kilowatt hour is actually a unit of energy. It’s an odd unit to measure energy in, but has become the standard. First, 1 kWh can be converted to 3.6 MJ (3600 s/h times 1000 W). Converting between kWh and GJ we find that electricity costs ($0.06 /kWh)(1000/3.6 kWh/GJ) = $17/GJ, which is remarkably close the natural gas cost. As a reminder, the units MJ and GJ stand for mega- and giga- joule. To complete the comparison we must convert the cost of gasoline into $/GJ. We measure gasoline in litres, but the energy content of gasoline is 32 MJ/L [1]. Question: Calculate the unit cost of gasoline in terms of $/GJ. Answer: ($1.15/L)(1000/32 L/GJ) = $36/GJ, or about twice the cost of electricity and natural gas. The difference is mostly due to the tax structure [citations?]. 1.2 The CO2 cost of energy Now let’s consider the environmental consequences, and express the cost in $ per kg CO2 and kg CO2 per GJ. Natural Gas Natural gas is mostly methane, CH4, which has an energy content of 55 MJ/kg [1]. Methane has a molecular mass of 16 and that of CO2 is 44, so 16 kg of CH4 burns to give 44 kg of CO2 [2]. In other words, 1 tonne of CH4 burns to give 2.75 tonnes of CO2. Question: How much money does it cost to produce 1 tonne of CO2 by burning natural gas? Answer: $300 Question: How many tonnes of CO2 is produced for each GJ natural gas Answer: 0.05 tonnes o CO2/GJ Electricity If your electricity comes from mature hydro-electric dams as does most of the electrical power in BC, then the greenhouse gas production per GJ of energy is tiny compared to other sources. If, however, it comes from coal-fired stations, as does some of the power in BC, then the CO2 production is large and easy to estimate. 1 It takes 2.6 Mtonnes of coal to be burnt each year in to produce 1 GWe , and this produces 8.9 Mtonnes of CO2 [3]. The mean heat of combustion of 30 MJ/kg [1], and the process has a thermal efficiency of 0.4 (i.e., we can get 12 MJ electrical from each kg of coal). Question: Calculate how many tonnes of CO2 burning coal produces per GJ of energy produced. 1 When electricity is produced in thermal power plants, we always have to be careful about the distinction between energy and power of the burnt fuel and energy and power in the electricity produced. Where there can be confusion, we use the subscript "th" for thermal power or energy, and "e" for electrical power or energy. Answer: 0.28 tonnes of CO2 per GJe Question: How much money does it cost to produce 1 tonne of CO2 by using electricity? Answer: $60 for each tonne of CO2. Note: we are ignoring transmission losses here, which may be substantial. Gasoline By the same process, we can calculate that burning gasoline produces 0.07 tonnes of CO2 per GJ (thermal, multiply by about 3 to obtain the mass per GJ mechanical, as automobile engines are about 25-40% efficient) and costs about $500 per tonne of CO2. Put another way, you make a tonne of CO2 for every $500-worth of gasoline you buy. Question: Using the data from above, fill in the rest of the table below. Table 1: Summary of dollar and environmental costs of energy Parameter Natural Gas Electricity Gasoline Cost (Vancouver 2010) C$15/GJ C$0.06/kWh C$1.15/L Heat of Combustion (MJ/kg) 55 12 (electric from coal) 46 Cost per GJ in Canadian 15 17 36 dollars CO2 production (tonnes/GJ) 0.05 0.28 (if from coal) 0.07 Cost of producing a tonne of 300 60 500 CO2 in Canadian dollars A range of value will be chosen for these answers. 2. Converting Heat Units Navigating the world of heat units can be confusing. The SI system of units was established in the 1960s, but it has not been completely adopted, and won’t be, particularly in industry that’s been around longer than the system of units. We’ll demonstrate how to move between these system of units. Though seemingly simple, the conversions we’ll be doing are an example of a much broader topic in physics, that of dimensional analysis. Not only useful for conversions, dimensional analysis will allow us to use our intuition to find formulas for many of the complex ideas we’ll be discussing in this course. Now on to some conversions using dimensional analysis. BTU/h Power is the rate of doing work or the rate at which energy is converted. Watts, the SI units for power, are defined to be joules of energy per second. Most of us are familiar with Watts, whether we have had to buy a light bulb, a power supply for our computers or an amp for our guitars. On the other hand, when buying barbeques, air conditioners or furnaces, the power is given instead in BTU/h (written usually as just BTU) where one BTU, or British Thermal Unit, is equal to 1055 joules [4]. Question: If we buy a large BBQ with a 36,000 BTU/h input, how many watts is that equivalent to? Answer: 10,550 W Think about how you calculated that value. You ensured that the units matched up such that some cancelled and some were added in order to derive a formula to do the conversion. It probably looked something like this: You may not have written out like this, but what you did was derive a formula that takes a value of power in units BTU/h and outputs it in units of Watts. Whether or not you were aware of it, the technique you used to derive this formula was Dimensional Analysis. We’ll use this idea to do some other conversions. While doing them, write out the formula explicitly and be aware of how the units play with each other. Thermal conductivity, U-values & R-values Thermal conductivity, k, is the ability of a material to conduct heat and is measured in W/mK. The power loss through material can be found by where k is the thermal conductivity of a material, A is the area of the material, ΔT is the temperature difference and x is the thickness of the material. The rate of heat transfer through a building can be calculated by dividing the thermal conductivity by the thickness of the material. This is called the U-value, or the overall heat transfer coefficient, and has units W/m2K. The inverse of the U-value, the R-value, describes the thermal resistance and is used frequently in construction. The R-value can be calculated by dividing the thickness of the material by its thermal conductivity, so by increasing the thickness of the insulated layer, the thermal resistance is increased [5]. The SI units of the R-value are m2k/W, but in the US it is given in ft2 oF h/BTU (though usually the values are given without units, i.e. R-10). Let’s take a look at how to convert ft2 oF h/BTU to m2k/W. We know: "1 ft = 0.3048 m "1 oF = 5/9 K "1 BTU = 1055 J Question: So, what is 1 ft2 oF h/BTU in units of m2k/W? Answer: 0.176 m2k/W Quads Quads, defined to be 1015 BTUs or 1.055 x 1018 J [6], are used when discussing large annual energy consumptions. For example, in 2008, the total worldwide energy consumption was 471x1018 J. Question: What was the worldwide consumption in quads? Answer: 450 quad The USA is responsible for 25% of the world’s energy consumption, or about 115 quads [7].