Introduction

Now that you have learned about the different forms of energy that occur to us in life, we can set up some energy balances, just as you have done for the mass balance. In this subsection, you will discover that the process used here is not very different when compared to the process concerning mass balance (except for the quantities).

Since you have seen that there is quite a range of energy types, we have to set up such a balance very carefully, taking every type of energy into account.  Sometimes we can also decide not to make an energy balance over all the energy in a system, but only over several types of energy. You can see this as an analogy of the components balance compared to a total mass balance. But, we will start slowly by setting up a total energy balance.