In article ,
says...
In article , Richard J Kinch
says...

Are you saying hoses do not themselves lose (waste, consume, dissipate,
whatever) power?

That's the gist of it. If you have a small hose, you cannot
support a large flow to run, say, a large impact wrench.
The same as trying to fill your washing machine through
a piece of 1/8 inch diamteter copper line. It will just
take a long time.

But the small piece of copper line does not dissipate
energy when doing so.


Actually it does; the temperature of the water will rise as
a result of the pressure drop as it flows thru the copper
tube. Some of the heat will be dissipated (in the sense
that a resistor dissipates energy) by the tube.

I also can't see any problem, in the context of this
discussion, with saying a hose, or any other restriction,
dissipates energy when a compressible gas flows thru it.
The energy may not be dissipated by the regulator in the
same sense as a resistor, but that use of "dissipate" is an
example of jargon, and presumably we've rejected electrical
analogies.

The use of "dissipation" to describe the loss of available
energy in a compressible fluid may confuse folks used to
the way it's applied to an electrical resistance, but that
doesn't make using the word in another sense incorrect. I
think it's pretty descriptive of the increase in entropy of
an expanding gas, and consistent with the ordinary
dictionary definition of dissipate-arguably more consistent
than the electrical usage.

Ned Simmons