On 2/12/12 my group-mate and I did the generator lab.

The purpose of this experiment was to see how much energy(voltages) was generated  based on the number of times the magnet passed through the spiral within the flashlight, or shaken back and forth.  The generator works based on Faraday’s law .

“Faraday’s law states that changing magnetic fluxes through coiled wires generates electricity. The greater the change in magnetic flux, the greater are the currents and voltages. ” This was discovered by Faraday in 1831.

Basically the force created by the opposite charges of the magnets can be harnessed to create energy. This is why shaking the flashlight back and forth, causing the magnet inside to pass back and forth through the coil inside causes it to create electricity.

This image resembles the guts of our hand held generators and the movement of the magnet through the coil.

Hey, Faraday is the same guy who discovered discovered the concept of the Faraday cage. Essentially he discovered and proved that an electrical charge stays on the outside of an conductor and does not affect anything on the inside. Which is why anyone standing inside of the Faraday cage in the museum of science will not get electrocuted even though the cage is being blasted with electricity.  Pretty awesome!

Back to the experiment.

The experiment, like our others, involved hooking our robot, or rather the core of our robot, minus the wheels etc up to the computer and then another set of wires connected the robot to the flashlight. The robot senses and gathers data from the flashlight and sends it to the computer.

We expected that the more times we shook the generator within the allotted 30 second intervals the more power we would generate and this proved just about true.

The following chart (which I am having trouble getting to work in this post) shows the numbers of shakes to the lest and the sum of squares of voltages generated by said shakes. The increase seems somewhat consistent except for the leap between 61 shakes equaling about 28 voltages to 70 equaling a much larger 85 voltages.

We also plotted these figures out on a graph which shows the upward trend more clearly. In conclusion, the amount of shakes does affect the amount of power generated by the magnetic field and all it took was the exchange of our own energy.

# of shakes		sum of squares of voltages
0		0.283537
40		20.55322
61		28.55173
70		85.43146
102		122.3841