Generator Lab

 It’s interesting to think that our hands have the capability to generate tangible energy. I suppose when you think about it logically, it makes sense, but to see what happens when our hands are put to use is actually amazing.

Today we learned about Faraday’s Law of Induction, something that was an entirely new concept to me. Before I introduce the law, I’ll go into a little background of the man brought this idea into society, which I personally believe is essential into fully grasping the law itself.

  Michael Farady was born in 1791 in England     and surprisingly enough recieved very little  formal education, mostly everything was self taught. His family was that of the lower class, so paid education was not an option. Faraday aquired most of his knowledge through different apprenticeships throughout his youth, beginning at age 14. Although by the end of his life, Oxford University granted him an honarary Doctor of Civil Law Degree. Faraday was a humble man, and rejected knighthood and the position as President of the Royal Society (of England)

In his adult life he established himself through his discoveries in the world of chemistry, physics, diamagnetism, and electricity which created a strong foundation of these areas, most of which are still used today.

As I mentioned before, the specific law of his that we are using (and arguably the most famous) is called Faraday’s Law of Induction.

The simple definition used in our experiment is:

“Generation of magnetic flux through coils of wire to generate electricity”
 This lab was relatively simple but complex at the same time. This brings me back to what I was saying before about our hands: our hand movement was the catalyst in the creation of electricity. Let me explain.

Process: We were equipped with what looked like an ordinary flashlight, except there was a a magnet inside, that moved along the base of the flashlight when shaken. The coils of wire inside, plus the magnet, and the movement of the flashlight produced electricity.

Goal: We wanted to see how much electricity was produced as well as the correspondence of shakes for every 30 seconds. Using the program LabView as well as our Mindstorm robots, we were able to accomplish this.

The flashlight was connected to the Lego Mindstorm robots, which in turn was connected via USB to the computer in LabView, and Labview was in turn connected to an Excel spreadsheet which would document our results.

We were supposed to collect 5 different results, at 30 second intervals each, the first test shaking the flashlight back and forth the slowest, and the 5th interval shaking the fastest. Heres a short table of what our results looked like.

Results:

# of Shakes      Voltage Squared (all at 30 second intervals, the constant)

0 shakes             .056532

23 Shakes          13.5308

33 shakes           14. 9879

80 Shakes          99.4786

92 shakes           155.6630

You can see how each time the more shakes added, created more voltage, which was to be expected.

If we were to look at this in a graph for, we could visibly see a scatterplot with a line drawn through that steadily increased with the number of shakes per 30 seconds.

I personally enjoyed this lab because it displayed that handheld devices for the home, have the potential to be equipped with these small type of generators that would allow to replace batteries, which ultimetely harm the environment as well as save electricity by making it ourselves.