Is kinetic energy made from movement can it be made into electricity?
i am no scientist so please can you explain your answers easily to understand!
thank you for your time
xxx
Answer:
Kinetic energy can be turned into electricity. It's done at power stations all the time.
The trouble is your thinking, I believe. To convert the kinetic energy into electricity, the kinetic energy is used up - i.e. the motion is used (and stopped) in the process. To use the kinetic energy of a car turning it into electricity will stop the moving car. It's actually put to use in Hybrid cars, they use generators to slow the car down.
If you've ever tried to move the arm of a generator to generate electricity, you will find it's hard to move - it's tiring, that's because it's slowing the movement of your arm to convert the kinetic energy into electrical energy.
Factories and cars can produce their own electricity, but the energy has to come from somewhere. To have kinetic energy, some other form of energy had to be used to cause the mass to move, giving the kinetic energy.
Basically, you can't get something for nothing - same in the real world as it is in the world of science.
so your question is that you want factory machines to make their own energy? They can but think about this: you want someone to run in place in a wheel or something to create kinetic energy to produce electricity for an entire machine to work. KE is .5*mass*velocity^2. In other words, a person could not make nearly enough energy. It is just not efficient.
If you're no scientist, then it's going to be a trifle difficult to explain.
Yes, energy of motion can be converted to electrical energy. It happens all the time, 24 hrs a day. They call it the local electric utility company.
The prob, darlin', is that the electric company builds huge generating facilities with crews to keep them going. It's called Economy of Scale. Individuals tried it in the late 1880's and 1890's but the cost to each self-generating customer was too high. Also, a lot of electric companies were consolidating into single area-wide servers, further lowering their costs of providing reliable service, and the concept of the modern electric utility was born.
By becoming an area-wide "monopoly", states across the country formed regulatory commissions to investigate and keep electric utility profits at a reasonable level while guaranteeing safe, reliable and affordable electric power.
Cars do do this. They use a flywheel to generate electricity-but it takes more power applied than you get back so its like having a leaky cup under a faucet. Energy is used up and lost by the system it drives even as the flywheel stores and transfers generated energy. Best I can do ya-look up flywheel in the dictionary or encyclopedia.
as far as i know cars convert kientic energy into electrical energy, and charges up the battery. This device is called the alternator.
In factories some equipment may have the same device. But there is a problem. Remember conservation of energy?? To move the car u need fuel. If u burn fuel u may get 100 units of energy. Lets say only 40 can be used. Out of the 40, 5 is used to charge up da battery and 35 for motion. So the more alternators u ahve the more fuel u have to burn to get to the destination.
When water is boiled and turned into steam, which is used to turn a turbine, then you are doing what you ask about above: turning kinetic energy into electrical energy (after first of all transferring heat energy into kinetic energy).
A factory could - and some do - generate electricity by kinetic means, such as that above. You should bear in mind though that you cannot destroy or create energy - merely convert it from one form into another and you can't perfectly convert it from X into Y without also converting some into Z (which is a waste, usually). I am talking about energy efficiency here: you want to convert kinetic energy into electrical energy in my turbine example, but some of the energy will be lost in the form of friction, for example.
The Kinetic energy (motion) of High pressure, high temperature steam, or of huge volumes of flowing water from a high up lake, is used to drive massive turbines in Power Stations.
The turbines are connected to Power Generators which produce our Electrical energy.
I guess that a factory could have a large water tank and a high pressure pump; or, maybe a large air compressor and, the Kinetic energy of the high pressure water or air could drive a turbine to drive a generator but, the cost of the installation would be far greater than the cost of power from the normal source.
These are good answers. The Laws of Conservation of Energy state that you can neither create nor distroy energy. However, energy can be converted. Machines in factories use energy to do their jobs. That energy must come from somewhere: power plants, steam generation, solar, etc.
With energy efficiency on the minds of many these days, innovative companies and organizations are looking for ways to maximize energy utilization. If we look, we could probably find a lot of wasted motion in our machines and equipment, and therefore wasted energy. There is a company that manufactures energy harvesting devices for industry. Motorized equipment produces vibrations and frequencies in specific areas of the spectrum. Devices exist that can be attached to motor housings to pick up these vibrations. The mechanical vibrations at certain frequencies cause a mechanical resonant condition inside the device, which makes its internal workings vibrate more intensely at that resonant frequency. Attached to the inner workings of the device is a small generator that works by moving a coil through a magnetic field (or vice-versa) to generate a small amount of electricity. It's not enough to supplement the motor's operation. But it is enough electricity to power wireless sensors that provide operators and engineers with sensor information about the health of the motor and the machine (pump, fan, etc.) that the motor drives.
If we look, we can find ways to harvest the energy that is wasted. My wife recently bought a hybrid car, as mentioned in some of the other answers. This technology helps put perspective on the energy we have taken for granted for most of our lives.
Because there is always a loss of energy through friction. So the amount of energy needed to keep a machine working will be more than it produces, so it stops.
Don't you remember in the Simpsons when the teachers went on strike, and Lisa was so desperate for approval she invented the perpetual motion machine? As Homer said, 'In this house, young lady, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.'
The earlier answers are very complicated and not entirely accurate.
Energy is the ability to do work (That's the scientific definition).
Kinetic energy is the energy present in anything moving. For example, a footballer uses muscles in his legs generate enough energy to kick the ball. His moving leg has kinetic energy which it transfers to the ball. The flying ball has kinetic energy which carries it through the air to the goal keeper who absorbs the kinetic energy with the muscles in his arms.
In engineering terms - The footballer does work on the ball and the ball does work on the goalkeeper.
Windmills are early examples of how the Kinetic energy of the wind could be converted into energy to grind wheat and corn into flour. During the industrial revolution windmills and watermills (using the Kinetic energy in flowing streams and rivers) were used to operate factory machinery. Later when electrical engineering developed, these mills were used to turn electricity generators.
But the industrial revolution also saw the invention of steam engines and internal combustion engines which could develop hundreds of times more energy than the kinetic energy of the mills. So the mills fell into disuse.
In short there just isn't sufficient kinetic energy in the wind or the rivers around a factory to generate its own power. If you put your pet dog, a great dane, into a treadmill and used his kinetic energy to generate electricity all night long he could only generate enough to run your car a kilometer or two, and it would cost a fortune in dog food.
There are exceptions - At the Hoover Dam in the USA, the colorado river has sufficient kinetic energy to power the bright lights and electrical needs of Las Vegas. But have you seen the size of the Hoover Dam and the water turbines?
Today we are running real low on the fuels necessary to keep 'heat engines' running, so we are reverting to the kinetic energy supplied by winds, rivers, tides, and waves. But it isn't the technology that's holding us back it's the size and scope of the projects necessary - One huge windmill for one small family car - One waterfall the size of Niagra for one small city.
There are some good answers up there but they are long so I thought I would try the short simple approach.
It takes power to keep a thing running. If you add extra power the thing runs faster. All of the input power is used up in maintaining the speed (kinetic energy).
If you use up some power to generate electricity, the thing runs slower. If can't possibly generate enough power to keep the thing running. Every bit of power used to generate electricity slows it down. You could boost the power input to keep it running the same speed, but it would be more power than your generator produced.
The answer to the first part of your question is yes, electricity can be generated using a bodies kinetic energy.this is how the bulk of our electricity is generated.
I'm guessing the real question you are asking in the second part is in regards to perpetual motion.or why once a machine has started does it require energy to maintain the motion. Simply put...friction. Machines are not 100% eefficient. A lot of the energy given to a machine is wasted mostly generating heat through friction. Some is also lost to noise. In other words:
Energy In = Energy Out + Losses.
Therefore for the process to be self-sustaining the losses would need to be eliminated. Something we haven't managed to achieve yet.
It sure can. What do you think a generator does?
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