Energy conversion

Energy transformation, also termed energy conversion, is the process of changing energy from one of its forms into another. In physics, energy is a quantity that provides the capacity to perform many actions—some as simple as lifting or warming an object. In addition to being convertible, energy is transferable to a different location or object, but it cannot be created or destroyed.

Energy in many of its forms may be used in natural processes, or to provide some service to society such as heating, refrigeration, lighting, or performing mechanical work to operate machines. For example, in order to heat your home, your furnace can burn fuel, whose chemical potential energy is thus converted into thermal energy, which is then transferred to to your home's air in order to raise its temperature.

In another example, an internal combustion engine burns gasoline to cause pressure that pushes the pistons, thus performing work in order to accelerate your vehicle, ultimately converting the fuel's chemical energy to your vehicle's additional kinetic energy corresponding to its increase in speed.

Conversions to thermal energy (thus raising the temperature) from other forms of energy, may occur with essentially 100% efficiency (many types of friction do this). Conversion among non-thermal forms of energy may occur with fairly high efficiency, though there is always some energy dissipated thermally due to friction and similar processes. Sometimes the efficiency is close to 100%, such as when potential energy is converted to kinetic energy as an object falls in vacuum, or when an object orbits nearer or farther from another object, in space.

Though, conversion of thermal energy to other forms, thus reducing the temperature of a system, has strict limitations, often keeping its efficiency much less than 100% (even when energy is not allowed to escape from the system). This is because thermal energy has already been partly spread out among many available states of a collection of microscopic particles constituting the system, which can have enormous numbers of possible combinations of momentum and position (these combinations are said to form a phase space). In such circumstances, a measure called entropy, or evening-out of energy distributions, dictates that future states of an isolated system must be of at least equal evenness in energy distribution. In other words, there is no way to concentrate energy without spreading out energy somewhere else.

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Wikipedia