Consider, if you will, the many little old ladies and little old men, and
mathophobics of both genders, who have successfully achieved the commercial
ticket without worrying about such things. Way too much analysis. If I was
preparing you for your CFI and you hit me with that you and I would have a
long talk about what is important and what is not important.

Bob Gardner

"buttman" wrote in message
oups.com...
I was under the impression that whenever energy is transformed from one
form to another, some is lost due to entropy. When fuel (chemical
energy) is transformed into mechanical energy, some energy is lost
because heat escapes the system through the exhaust pipe and oil lines.
I just looked up entropy and it said "For a closed thermodynamic
system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not
available to do work", in other words, the energy that has been "lost".
So the heat through the exhause pipe could be called entropy. Is this
not correct?

Now if you have X joules of kinetic energy and Y joules of potential
energy at the begining of the maneuver, you mathematically should end
with the same KE and PE values all throughout the maneuver. Given
you're power settings are so that you're KE and PE are constant,
meaning the energy the engine is outputting is equal to all the drag
forces of the airframe, i.e. straight and level.

Now, in nature that perfect energy conversion is not possible. Some
energy is going to be lost. This lost energy is entropy. As your
airspeed decreases, your engine is outputting less energy, so at the
top of our no-turning lazy 8, we actually have less TOTAL energy than
when we started. Thats because the prop is experiencing more induced
drag and as a result that energy lost is entropy. Does that make sense?
My question is will a constant speed prop, since it does not lose
horsepower at slower airspeeds, not lose as much eneregy throughout the
maneuver making it easier?

By the way I'm a private pilot with an instrument rating, and am about
15 hours away from getting my commercial. My real name isn't Buttman
(although I WISH IT WAS), its just the name I use on the internet, so
it shouldn't be in the FAA database.