My group is ambitious. We decided to make a hand-held crank generator.

Super cute!

It was made out of cardboard, copper wire, magnets, and a few other things. It has a little crank on it that lights a tiny led light. Here’s the webpage for it, complete with a youtube video:

http://www.amasci.com/amateur/coilgen.html

For our experiment, Jersson hooked it up to LabView and calculated the voltage it generates. It works pretty well. We were watching it light up, and Cisnell filmed it.

My favorite part about this experiment is its real world potential for application. I actually own a real hand-crank radio. The hand-crank generator can be used for people who need temporary electricity. It reminds me of the people in Haiti. I read a story about how a few scattered homes still had power after the earthquake in 2010. People were charging guests to charge their cell phones and use their electricity. I know that they sell hand-crank radios, flashlights, and cell phone chargers. I actually just remembered that we have the flashlight in addition to the radio.

So we are going to class on Monday to present out experiment to a group and have them present their experiment to us. Our group is going to do a great job. The other group is going to be impressed and get a kick out of the tiny little light. I’m looking forward to it.

Everyone was handed out a generator. It was a small one (about the size of a flashlight), and it had a magnet inside of it.

This is kind of what it looked like.

In order to generate power to it, we had to shake it. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Oh wait, yes I have.

The Shake Weight might know something we don’t about power.

We took five measurements while my lab partner, Matt, shook the generator. First we measured zero shakes per measurement span in LabView. I think it was 30 seconds. Then we measured it at about 20, 40, 100, and 130 shakes. Here’s what the results look like on a graph:

[Click to Enlarge.]

As predicted, a higher number of shakes meant a higher voltage. These handheld generators don’t generate too much voltage, but they have real world applications. The flashlight one is a great idea for long-term power outages. However, I can’t see anyone powering a laptop or something like that by shaking something. That would create a muscle cramp quickly.

In class today, we measured voltage in a small solar cell using LabView. Upon opening, the program showed a black box that calculated the voltage of whatever was hooked onto the robot. It would spit out around ten voltage measurements for each run.

The first runs we did had varying distances of light from the cell. We used 0, 2, 4, 6, and 7 inches and ran the voltage calculator for each. Here’s a graph of the results:

[Click to Enlarge]

Each voltage is the average of the ten different measurements the computer took of the same distance. As expected, more distance between the cell and the light meant less voltage.

I thought that people just put solar panels on their roofs rather than the ground because there was space up there. Now I can see that if one was using solar panels for power, putting them as close to the light source (the sun) as possible would be beneficial to gather more of the sun’s energy for electrical use. Apparently Sun Chips uses this power. It’s on the bag.

So is this.

The second measurement we took was Voltage vs. Filter color. We used 3 different light filters on the solar cell – blue, red, and green. In fact, the chart is color-coded:

[Once again, click to Enlarge]

The real-world use I can think of for this lab is in the making of the actual panels. This measurement of voltage can tell us which kind of material to use on the panel to soak in the maximum amount of voltage. So if anyone is thinking of going green, here’s how solar cells work:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/solar-cell.htm

Remember this? Solar panels!

We played with Lego Mindstorm robots. The LabView program is this really nifty program that we use to program the robots. We attached weights in a pulley system to the robots. We had weights set at different increments while we had LabView get some data for us. From there, we used Microsoft Excel to plot that data. The graphs are as follows:

[Click to enlarge.]

My partner in this lab was super helpful. He’s really good at excel, so we finished with little problem. I was a happy camper.

I had a lot of fun with this lab because the robot is exciting to work with. I like seeing the robot I made (or the same kind of robot I made) actually working. I never thought I could possibly do that. However, I did remark in an earlier post that those robots are ages 8+.

The making of these robots is, technologically, right up there with the time one of my friends showed me a game he created on his graphing calculator. It was a miracle for me because I am not so good at the science stuff. I’m a psych major and much better at expressive and artsy things.

Before we did this lab, I didn’t really think about how many robots society relies on. I then realized that our lives would require so much more effort without it. Then I realized something else. Life was more work, but inventions like fork lifts came only a little while after the real need for them. As technology increases, so does our need to make everything easier with it.

Despite the thoroughly creepy pictures begging me to donate money on the banner, I found the Fukushima disaster on Wikipedia.

Please stop, Jimmy Wales. I never plagiarized from you, so I owe you nothing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

According to this website, in March this year, there were a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.

2 of the reactors had been shut down for planned maintenance. Then, the plant experienced equipment problems following the earthquake. Then, they were flooded by a tsunami. These poor people really couldn’t catch a break. The natural disasters electrical failures and therefore the generators heated up. The tsunami ruined things with the coolers so that everything overheated.

The first 3 reactors experienced a total meltdown. It was even estimated that “75% of the core of one unit melted and slumped into the lower quarter of the unit.” I can’t really even tell what that means, but it sounds absolutely awful. Reactors 1 and 3 had explosions, and reactor 4 had fires.

This is a giant hole in reactor 4. It’s not supposed to be there.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1367684/Japan-earthquake-tsunami-Fukushima-nulear-plant-radiation-leak-kill-people.html

The number of this meltdown on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) started out at 4 and was ultimately raised to a 7, the highest number on the scale.

Two of the workers at the plant died from what is thought to be blood loss, and 45 were reported dead after a nearby hospital was evacuated. However, that’s not the most dangerous part. It was estimated by a U.S. scientist that 1,000 people will die of cancer from radiation exposure as a result of the meltdown. The disaster brought the rate of cancer up by 0.1 percent.

We made robots!

Similar but, unfortunately, not the exact one.

We created Lego Mindstorms robots (Ages 8+) last Monday. Each pair got a box of tiny pieces and a couple of huge pieces. I was slightly inept at assembly but eventually I got the back wheel part assembled. After the whole thing was put together, we plugged it into the computer and used Labview to program it. Initially, we just made the thing go forward. In class today, we were shown a screen with a whole program for the robot on it. I was concerned. Thankfully, we didn’t have to create that program – we just had to use it to calculate distance and velocity. We manually measured the distance and velocity while having Labview measure those same things. The measurements went as follows:

The point of the calculations was to measure at 3 different power levels.