Table of Contents

Project 9: Part A: Post-Apocalypse Now

Project 9A: Learning issues

  • Energy Conservation
  • Thermal Energy
  • Specific Heat Capacity
  • Thermal Equilibrium

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Henry Gupta has returned. It turns out he is a pretty bad dude. Gupta hid a remote communication device on the satellite that was activated. It launched many nuclear missiles across the world scorching most of the Earth.

100 years later…

You are a member of the Scorched Earth Army, an elite team of survivors responsible for the protection of and collection of resources for Quadrant 4.

Captain Benjamin L. Willard, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, and your team have emerged from your underground bunker to find a deserted wasteland. Well, it's nearly deserted….

Your team is attacked by wild boar-tigers. While fighting them off, you manage to slay one of them and collect it for sustenance. Your team returns to the entrance of the bunker only to find it is locked and no one is answering the door.

Your team takes refuge near a fantastic oil fire. It's getting cold and you are hungry. Willard suggests you cook the beast using an age old technique: boiling water in a dirt pit. You'd like to avoid the carcinogens associated with cooking the beast directly over the oil fire. Your team finds a pile of hard and soft rocks near the oil fire. The temperature of the oil fire is 2000K. To properly cook the beast, you need to achieve a cooking temperature of 370K. Design the pit.

Hard rock Soft rock
Density ($\times 10^{3}\,{\rm kg/m^{3}}$) 2.67 2.2
Specific Heat Capacity ($\times 10^{3}\,{\rm J/kg/K}$) 1.0 1.4

Project 9: Part B: Post-Apocalypse Now

Stuck in the wilderness for a number of days and unable to contact the people in your bunker, your team along with Willard and Kilgore set out to find a new safe haven. After traversing the scorched wasteland for a number of days you see postings for “Thunderdome”, which promises “sanctuary for all”. You reach a canyon with a signpost that indicates that the Thunderdome is on the other side of the canyon. The other side of the canyon is 30 meters below the height of where you currently stand and about 610 meters from the ground. The canyon appears to be 200 meters across. Beside you is a run-down car whose engine does not seem to run but after some initial messing around you realize that a battery is connected to the wheels and that a percentage of the energy that is being lost to friction is being stored in the battery. Further investigation tells you that the battery energy can be converted directly into kinetic energy by pushing a big red button in the car. Investigating the spring, you see that it can compress 13m and has a spring constant of 650000 N/m. The car is 20 meters from the spring and from the spring to the edge of the cliff is 50 meters. When you push the car back to the spring you measure that the tires have changed temperature by 1 kelvin. You need to know if propelling yourself with the spring will get you to safety.