Bike Mi Vie said:
How much energy does it take to move a 100 lbs person.
One pithy answer is that it takes no energy at all.
If you have a 100 pound person over here and you want him over there you can grease up the floor (no energy required) give him a small push toward the goal (requiring as little energy as you please), wait for him to slide where you need him and then give him a push so that he stops moving (recovering the energy you used in the first push).
Zero energy used.Another answer is that it depends on how fast you need him to get there. If you want to get your 100 pound (call it 50 kilograms) person to move 10 kilometers in 1000 seconds and you are not planning on reclaiming any energy at the end of the trip then the most energy-efficient way to go about it is to accelerating him to 10 meters per second as fast as you can and then let him coast the rest of the way.
The required energy is given by ##KE=\frac{1}{2}mv^2## where ##m## = 50 kg and ##v## = 10 meters/second. That comes to 2500 Joules -- enough energy to run a 100 watt incandescent bulb for just over 4 minutes.
2500 Joules energy used.The above assumes an unrealistic road with zero friction in a weightless vehicle with no air resistance.
A quick trip to
Google (see table IV on page 148) suggests a ballpark figures of 50 pounds of rolling resistance and 125 pounds of wind resistance for a sedan cruising at 50 miles per hour for a total of about 175 pounds.
A pair of 3 inch diameter evacuated hemispheres can provide 105 pounds of vacuum force (##F=Pa## and ##a=\pi r^2## with ##r## = 1.5 inches and ##P## = 14.7 PSI). This is not quite enough to push the [rather ancient] cars contemplated in the Google reference at 50 mph, but it is close.
Let us re-imagine the pair of 3 inch diameter hemispheres as a 3 inch diameter evacuated cylinder and a 3 inch diameter piston with a 3 inch stroke. The piston will have 21.2 cubic inches of displacement (##v=\pi hr^2## with ##r##=1.5 and ##h##=3.0) the hemisphere pair totals only 14.1 cubic inches (##v=\frac{4}{3}\pi r^3## with ##r##=1.5).
Roughly speaking, that means that the vacuum energy in
21.2 cubic inches of vacuum is good for only
3 inches of automotive motion at 50 mph. Meanwhile, the piston would take about 3.5 milliseconds to complete that stroke.