Week 3, PSC 320 Winter 2019

Monday: Celebrate Equality, Inclusivity and Acceptance! Campus Holiday for Martin Luther King


Wednesday’s Class :

Before Class

  • Please make a USA wealth graph where the x-axis is each person in the USA ordered from poorest to richest, and the y-axis is how much money they have. That is if everyone had $300,000 (USA total wealth of $100 Trillion divided by 325 million people), it would look like the one on the left, and if each person had $0.2 cents more than the person before, it would look like the one on the right with the poorest person having nothing and the richest person having $600,000. Please make two graphs: graph what you think the USA really looks like, and make a graph of how you think the USA would ideally look.
  • Only after you’ve done the above, please see Moyers: USA wealth gap
  • Please watch Conversion Efficiency with Slides (from Heat Engines Video)
  • Look up and read about cogeneration. What does it mean?
  • Please watch Carbon Intensity, and Carbon Intensity Slides.
  • Please have a look at this article about China’s decreasing carbon intensity to get a feel about how we use these terms… and see what China is doing.
  • If you haven’t sent it to me already, please send me your self intervention.
  • Thanks for the feedback on the class that you gave me Friday. I have posted it on the main class website. Please read through it because it is interesting (to me) that there is vast disparity in your experiences in this class. In particular, there are great differences in how students respond to the lack of structure and the learning model.
  • Watch this assigned video about how people learn.
  • Folks did pretty badly on the BE #2. Please make sure that you find a way to learn the difference between power and energy. And please learn how the different engines work. You might go back to the website: Animated Engines and check out the different cycles. Make sure that you can slow the cycles way way way way down (slider bar underneath the animation), so that you can identify where the compression is (where work is put into the fluid) and where it expands (does work for us). Why do we get more work out than we put in? Also many people drew the Otto cycle upside down. Theoretically, it could work that way, but it’s rarely done that way.
  • Solutions for Activity #1, Calorimeter are posted on main class website.

During Class: Hand in PS #2

After Class


Friday: Activity: Please prepare: electricity generation, get power meters (future)

Before Class

During Class

  • Big Exam! #3… Know about Efficiency

During Activity

  • We will look at electricity generation hardware and transformers
  • Please review your power calculations from last week. Do you understand the mathematical relationship between power and energy?

Friday: Please think about projects