DEANO DESIGNS
BEN CRAVEN pt. 1
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Approximate Calculations
Now, I know that the idea of approximate calculations sounds incredibly boring and sometimes daunting but I believe that they are essential. Ben Craven (PDE lecturer) holds this same opinion. We recently had a talk with him where he displayed why they are so important and what we need to do to solve them.
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What is a Small Amount of Energy?
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Ben first asked us to consider the actions we take in our daily lives and the amount of energy we consume. I found this really hard to quantify as I have never actually thought about the different tasks we do and the power they consume. This led to Ben giving us an example calculation to complete. This asked us to consider the amount of energy it takes to boil a cup of water and then how far this power would allow a car to travel. After some calculations and data finding I came to the conclusion that the car would only travel 120m. Here are my beautiful calculations:
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So what is the takeaway here? Well I think it is that we as a society need to realise the impact that the activities we complete have on the environment around us. We are extremely hesitant about using a kettle to boil but water, but would you question once about driving 120m in your car? I personally think this ideology has be perpetrated through advertisements, a lack of simple understanding and government policies. Frankly it's often the people in power that don't understand these simple figures and calculations.
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Viability Calculations
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Now, this idea of approximate calculations is not only for telling the public the amount of energy they use on a daily base. For Product Design Engineers it lets us know whether of not our idea are actually viable. Ben used the example of a oxygen concentrator that was supposed to be powered by being dragged along. After completing the calculation it was determined that the person would need to walk at 1m/s while dragging along a 10Kg weight. Now bearing in mind that the consumer profile was someone with breathing problems, I hope you can see that this idea would be completely unviable.
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It's these simple calculations that can save designers lots of time in the early stage of the design process and I want t implement this into my own design process more often.
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What about me?
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Like I mentioned earlier I have no idea the impact I have on the environment (in terms of the power I use) so I just want to do some simple, Ben Craven style calculations to figure out how much power I use in a day of travelling in and out of university. For refrence I drive to the train station (2 miles), get the train into Central Station (10 miles) and then get the bus to Glasgow University (2 miles)
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There you go. I use 40.8KW worth of power in travel every day just from getting in and out of uni. But what does that mean. What does 40.8KW worth of power over 2 hours equate to. Well, imagine boiling a kettle for 36 hours, powering 200 light bulbs for the amount of time I have been travelling or charging 400 phones. That's what I am talking about when it comes to the fact that we need to realise as a society how much power we use. Doing these calculations has certainly given me an insight.
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