I'm just generally excited about getting back into the classroom after a long sabbatical. I'm thinking about problem-set problems for the Physics Majors. Here's what's in my head right now:
NYC has had a hot summer, with most buildings running air conditioning on a thermostat continuously. To save energy, NYU (and other large entities in NYC) asked their employees to conserve energy in various ways, some of which we might take issue with. Here's an uncontroversial one: You should take the stairs, not the elevator.
But is that uncontroversial? What considerations are required to figure out whether this policy would reduce or increase energy consumption? Obviously—if you take the stairs—you use less elevator energy, but then you drop a metabolic load on the building air-conditioning. Which uses more power in the end? Use a combination of web research and simple physical arguments to make cases, and identify weaknesses in your argument as you change assumptions. Things that matter include: Neither humans nor elevators are 100-percent efficient delivery vehicles for potential energy (in fact, can you see a fundamental argument that elevators must spend more than 50 percent of their energy generating heat?). Elevators are heavy but counter-weighted. Some buildings have very busy elevators, so your contribution to the elevator load is only the marginal contribution; in other buildings you are typically the only person in the elevator. Air conditioning systems have efficiencies limited by fundamental ideas in thermodynamics, but are probably much less efficient than the limits. And so on!
Thanks to Andrei Gruzinov (NYU) for starting me thinking about this one.
