12 Overview of the Types of Energy and Its Conservation
Brokk Toggerson and OpenStax
If you look in high-school science textbooks, they will often list a myriad of energy types: chemical, thermal, kinetic, nuclear, … However, by now you know that physics is all about distillation: finding the fewest number of fundamental rules needed to explain the universe. So, are there underlying commonalities among all these different types? In short, yes! This chapter will explore these underlying patterns and provide a brief overview of the different types of energy we will consider in this course. Later chapters will then explore each type in a bit more detail.
How Many Kinds of Energy Are There?
Two. Ultimately, all the aforementioned types of energy (chemical, thermal, kinetic, nuclear, …) boil down to just two different kinds: kinetic energy and potential energy. is the capacity to do work (push or pull on something for a distance) arising from an object’s motion. is then the capacity to do work due to the relative positions of different objects within a system. Let’s look at these two categories in detail.
Kinetic Energy
Potential Energy[1]
What if we lift a motionless wrecking ball two stories above a car with a crane? If the suspended wrecking ball is unmoving, can we associate energy with it? The answer is yes. The suspended wrecking ball has associated energy that is fundamentally different from the kinetic energy of objects in motion. This energy form results from the potential for the wrecking ball to do work. If we release the ball it would do work. Because this energy type refers to the potential to do work, we call it potential energy. Objects transfer their energy between kinetic and potential in the following way: As the wrecking ball hangs motionless, it has 0 kinetic and 100 percent potential energy. Once it releases, its kinetic energy begins to increase because it builds speed due to gravity. Simultaneously, as it nears the ground, it loses potential energy. Somewhere mid-fall it has 50 percent kinetic and 50 percent potential energy. Just before it hits the ground, the ball has nearly lost its potential energy and has near-maximal kinetic energy. Other examples of potential energy include water’s energy held behind a dam, or a person about to skydive from an airplane.
Why do we care about springs?
In the prior section, we discussed springs as having a potential energy. You may be asking yourself, “I am a life-science student! I don’t care about metal coils, why are we studying them?” This is a good question. The reason we will spend a lot of time studying springs in this course is that many different materials can be modeled by a spring. Some good examples are:
- Tendons – They pull back when stretched. The presence of this restorative force in our Achilles tendons makes us more efficient runners!
- DNA and other molecular bonds – Molecular bonds work very much like springs: when stretched they pull back, and when compressed they push against that push. Molecules even oscillate (bounce back and forth) as though each atom is connected to a spring as shown in the video below.
Conservation of Energy[2]
Energy can be converted from one form into another, but all of the energy present before a change occurs always exists in some form after the change is completed. This observation is expressed in the law of conservation of energy: during a chemical or physical change, energy can be neither created nor destroyed, although it can be changed in form. (This is also one version of the first law of thermodynamics, as you will learn later.)
When one substance is converted into another, there is always an associated conversion of one form of energy into another. Heat is usually released or absorbed, but sometimes the conversion involves light, electrical energy, or some other form of energy. For example, chemical energy (a type of potential energy) is stored in the molecules that compose gasoline. When gasoline is combusted within the cylinders of a car’s engine, the rapidly expanding gaseous products of this chemical reaction generate mechanical energy (a type of kinetic energy) when they move the cylinders’ pistons.
An example of conservation of energy using a simulation
Example – Conservation of Energy
Problem
A typical gasoline tank for a car has 
of energy. Let’s say that a car is initially coasting on a flat surface with 
of kinetic energy, when all the gasoline has been burned, how much kinetic energy do you expect the car to have?
Solution
We are using the idea of conservation of energy above. We have of energy in gasoline and of kinetic energy for a total of
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Since the total amount of energy cannot change, this is the amount of kinetic energy that the car must have after all the gasoline has been burned: 
Homework
- Energy types described mathematically in this course.
The capacity to do work (push or pull on something for a distance) arising from an object's motion. We can either think of the bulk motion of an object or the net energy from the random motions of the constituent particles due to their temperature.
The capacity to do work due to the relative positions of different objects within a system. There are many different kinds. The ones we will focus on here are gravitational, spring, and chemical.
