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Wave power is the transport of energy by ocean surface waves, and the capture of that energy to do useful work — for example, electricity generation, water desalination, or the pumping of water (into reservoirs). Machinery able to exploit wave power is generally known as a wave energy converter (WEC).
The ancient Greek understanding of physics was limited to the statics of simple machines (the balance of forces), and did not include dynamics or the concept of work. During the Renaissance the dynamics of the Mechanical Powers, as the simple machines were called, began to be studied from the standpoint of how far they could lift a load, in addition to the force they could apply, leading ...
Thermodynamic work is one of the principal kinds of process by which a thermodynamic system can interact with and transfer energy to its surroundings. This results in externally measurable macroscopic forces on the system's surroundings, which can cause mechanical work, to lift a weight, for example, [1] or cause changes in electromagnetic, [2] [3] [4] or gravitational [5] variables.
tech: the power the Z machine reaches in 1 billionth of a second when it is fired [citation needed] 3 × 10 14: weather: Hurricane Katrina's rate of release of latent heat energy into the air. [48] 3 × 10 14: tech: power reached by the extremely high-power Hercules laser from the University of Michigan. [citation needed] 4.6 × 10 14
Examples of transducers include a battery (from chemical energy to electric energy), a dam (from gravitational potential energy to kinetic energy of moving water (and the blades of a turbine) and ultimately to electric energy through an electric generator), and a heat engine (from heat to work). Examples of energy transformation include ...
Just as a small increment of energy in a mechanical system is the product of a force times a small displacement, so an increment in the energy of a thermodynamic system can be expressed as the sum of the products of certain generalized "forces" which, when unbalanced, cause certain generalized "displacements" to occur, with their product being the energy transferred as a result.
The potential energy, U, depends on the position of an object subjected to gravity or some other conservative force. The gravitational potential energy of an object is equal to the weight W of the object multiplied by the height h of the object's center of gravity relative to an arbitrary datum: =
Electric power is the rate at which electric energy is transferred by an electric circuit. The SI unit of power is the watt, one joule per second. Electric power, like mechanical power, is the rate of doing work, measured in watts, and represented by the letter P. The term wattage is used colloquially to mean "electric power in watts."