Solar Updraft Tower is a renewable-energy power plant for generating electricity from solar power. It is a project that use hot plate to heat up the temperature and create a solar energy. The hot plate heats the air go though the tower, to make the pinwheel spin. This is a chimney effect.
We made a solar updraft tower, and see if the temperature over time inside the tower has an effect on the movement of the pinwheel.
We prepare the all the material that we need.
Material: a scissor, a short wire, 3 cans, tape, mini multimeter, hot plate, 2 corner brace zincs, a pinwheel.
When we got all those materials. We started to make our solar updraft power.
- Put 3 cans on the top of each other, and use the tape to wrap around them.
- Wrap 2 corner brace zincs on the bottom of the cans tower. Make sure that the bottom of the cans cannot touch on the hot plate
- Bend a wire, and stick the pinwheel on the top by tape
- Wrap the that wire both side of the top can (as the picture below)
- Make a small hole in the middle of cans tower to insert the mini multimeter
- Place the whole tower on the hot place
- Open mini multimeter and set it at Fahrenheit degree
- Open hot plate and mark up on the pinwheel to count how many rountate it move at the different temperature.
- We tested at different temperature in 1 minutes for each
we put the solar updraft tower over the hot plate when we finished the tower.
but, the pinwheel is made by myself that made it loss balance, therefore, I need to go to buy a new pinwheel. we did not got the data collecting in our second meeting.
We did not have hot plate For our third meeting.
However, we got the data collecting in classes.
Overall, we were successful in proving our hypothesis is true. Even though we had a hard time in collecting data, and the experiment did not run very well, we still figure out that the air’s speed will increase, and the pinwheel will move faster at high temperature.