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Calculating the Fuel Efficiency from “How To”
Since I love Randal Munroe’s book How To (Penguin Press), I going through each chapter and working on the equations included in the book. Of course, in a book for the general public you can’t get all into the weeds of the maths and stuff. But no one can stop me here. You can’t stop me.
For this post, I’m going to look at the equation to estimate the fuel efficiency of a driving house. Yes, the chapter was all about cool ways to move — and one way would be to just try your house to a new place.
As with my previous post (on how high a human can jump), I want to recreate the equation in LaTeX — for fun. Here you go.
There’s several things to do here:
- Explain where this equation comes from.
- Check the numbers and the final answer.
- Check the units (make sure this actually gives a value of miles per gallon).
Let’s get started.
Calculating fuel efficiency.
Suppose I have a car that drives 1 mile at a speed of 45 mph. Why does this even require energy? The answer is the air drag. As the car moves through the air, there is a backwards pushing force. This force applied over the distance of 1 mile would do work (physics work) with a negative value — since the force is in the…
