Talk:Mechanical energy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

WikiProject Physics This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, which collaborates on articles related to physics.
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale.
??? This article has not yet received an importance rating within physics.

Help with this template This article has been rated but has no comments. If appropriate, please review the article and leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.
WikiProject Energy
Energy Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Energy, which collaborates on articles related to energy.
Start This article has been rated as start-Class on the assessment scale.
??? This article has not yet received an importance rating within energy.

This article has been rated but has no comments. If appropriate, please review the article and leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

Contents

[edit] Problems

Energy is a state function and work is not. That is covered under those terms. Mechanical energy and mechanical work should be separate articles and not merged. I don't have time to improve this article right now, and it's properly labeled as a stub. I'm removing the merge tag and adding the expansion tag here. Flying Jazz 02:56, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
Agree. As regards the stub tag, though, I'm not sure what more there is to say. --Smack (talk) 17:10, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Expansion request removal

I would like to remove the expansion request. This article should give people a general idea of what's going on, and point them to one of the articles in the see-also list. --Smack (talk) 06:46, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Expansion request filled

Good grief; entire textbooks could be written on this subject. This is definitely a fundamental topic that schoolchildren will look up and will need help understanding. This article should give a clear explanation of the concept, with examples, without depending on other articles for necessary background. I've an article from scratch to try and do this. The next thing to add would probably be illustrations. -- Beland 23:18, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Looks pretty decent. Now if someone could reconcile it with mechanical work, so that they refer to each other in the right places and don't duplicate anything that they shouldn't, it would be really nice. --Smack (talk) 04:41, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Energy stored in compressed gas is kinetic, not potential.

For example, compressed gas exerts pressure because electromagnetic forces between particles tend to push them apart. Compressing a gas (moving the particles "uphill" against repulsive electromagnetic forces) stores potential energy in a similar way that pushing a boulder up a hill does (moving the object uphill against the attractive gravitational force of the Earth).

The above statement is just wrong. It would be correct for a solid, but not for a gas. The particles in a gas are always moving. The pressure of a gas gives the force it can apply, not the energy it contains. The temperature of a gas together with the number of particles gives the energy. After all, nRT is energy. Pressure is force per unit area, as in pounds per square inch, which happens to be equal to energy per unit volume, because work (change in energy) is force times distance.

See Joule-Thomson effect. For non-ideal gasses, compression adds or removes potential energy depending on circumstances.

http://www.chem.arizona.edu/~salzmanr/480a/480ants/jadjte/jadjte.html "This is an important and useful result. It says that the internal energy of an ideal gas is not a function of T and V, but of T only."


[edit] An actual definition

I was reading through this and I don't think I can find an actual clear definition of the term. Not anything special, just have it set in stone. "Mechanical energy is..."

That's all for now...

DUbblecoMB 18:55, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 10:00, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wow

I don't really have time to write this article, but "the principle of general conservation of energy is so far an unbroken rule of physics - as far as we know, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form"?!! E=mc^2??? That's embarassing, but i'll leaveit so others can see it was, in fact, actually on this page. But I should stop talking, since I don't have time to do anything about it. . . —Preceding unsigned comment added by Drock2289 (talk • contribs) 05:12, 8 April 2008 (UTC)