What do you mean by degradation of energy? Explain it by taking one example of your daily life.

While transforming energy from one form to another desired form, the entire energy does not change into the desired form. A part of energy changes either to some other undesirable form (usually heat due to friction) or a part is lost to the surroundings due to radiation and becomes useless. This conversion of energy to the undesirable form is called dissipation of energy or degradation of energy.

Since this part of the energy is not available to us for any productive purpose so we call this part of the energy as degraded energy.

Example — When a vehicle is run by using the chemical energy of its fuel a major part is wasted as heat and sound. Only a part of it is changed into useful mechanical energy.