Engineering Expert Witness Blog

      In my work as an engineering expert I’ve dealt with all forms of energy, just as we’ve watched James Prescott Joule do.   He constructed his Joule Apparatus specifically to demonstrate the connection between different forms of energy.   Today we’ll see how he furthered his discoveries by building a prototype power plant capable of producing electricity, a device which came to be known as Joule’s Experiment With Electricity.

Joule’s Experiment With Electricity

      As the son of a wealthy brewer, Joule had been fascinated by electricity and the possibility of using it to power his family’s brewery and thereby boost production.   To explore the possibilities, he went beyond the Apparatus he had built earlier and built a device which utilized electricity to power its components.   The setup for Joule’s experiment with electricity is shown here.

      Coal was used to bring water inside a boiler to boiling point, which produced steam.   The steam’s heat energy then flowed to a steam engine, which in turn spun a dynamo, a type of electrical generator.

      Tracing the device’s energy conversions back to their roots, we see that chemical energy contained within coal was converted into heat energy when the coal was burned.   Heat energy from the burning coal caused the water inside the boiler to rise, producing steam.   The steam, which contained abundant amounts of heat energy, was supplied to a steam engine, which then converted the steam’s heat energy into mechanical energy to set the engine’s parts into motion.   The engine’s moving parts were coupled to a dynamo by a drive belt, which in turn caused the dynamo to spin.

      Next time we’ll take a look inside the dynamo and see how it created electricity and led to another of Joule’s discoveries being named after him.

Copyright 2015 – Philip J. O’Keefe, PE

Engineering Expert Witness Blog

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