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Concept
Energy density
Summary
In physics, energy density is the amount of energy stored in a given system or region of space per unit volume. It is sometimes confused with energy per unit mass which is properly called specific energy or .
Often only the useful or extractable energy is measured, which is to say that inaccessible energy (such as rest mass energy) is ignored. In cosmological and other general relativistic contexts, however, the energy densities considered are those that correspond to the elements of the stress-energy tensor and therefore do include mass energy as well as energy densities associated with pressure.
Energy per unit volume has the same physical units as pressure and in many situations is synonymous. For example, the energy density of a magnetic field may be expressed as and behaves like a physical pressure. Likewise, the energy required to compress a gas to a certain volume may be determined by multiplying the difference between the gas pressure and the external pressure by the change in volume. A pressure gradient describes the potential to perform work on the surroundings by converting internal energy to work until equilibrium is reached.
There are different types of energy stored in materials, and it takes a particular type of reaction to release each type of energy. In order of the typical magnitude of the energy released, these types of reactions are: nuclear, chemical, electrochemical, and electrical.
Nuclear reactions take place in stars and nuclear power plants, both of which derive energy from the binding energy of nuclei. Chemical reactions are used by organisms to derive energy from food and by automobiles to derive energy from gasoline. Liquid hydrocarbons (fuels such as gasoline, diesel and kerosene) are today the densest way known to economically store and transport chemical energy at a large scale (1 kg of diesel fuel burns with the oxygen contained in ≈15 kg of air). Electrochemical reactions are used by most mobile devices such as laptop computers and mobile phones to release energy from batteries.
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