Is air pressure contained in a compressor tank the same thing as potential energy?
In: Physics
Going a bit deeper than an ELI5, all air pressure is the force of air molecules bouncing off of each other. Imagine a bunch of little balls like you would see in a lottery machine. If you push them together, they have less space around each one, so they are going to hit each other more often and thus bounce a bit faster. That takes more energy to do, so raising the potential energy. OR you could cool them down which would slow them all down a bit. That’s why your tire sensor might go off on the first day it snows. Volume, Pressure, Temperature and how many particles you start with are all related.
The air pressure we feel is actually the weight of all of the air above your head in earth’s atmosphere. It works out to about 14.7 pounds per square inch, pushing everywhere all the time. You don’t feel that because every bit of you is pushing back just as hard. If you go up a mountain, there’s less weight above you and pressure goes down. Things also get weird when you start removing most of the molecules and you get what’s called a vacuum.
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