During the week of February 22nd, we conducted a generator experiment. The purpose of this lab was to explore Faraday’s Law in hopes to better understand what it means; Faraday’s Law states that electricity can be generated when magnetic fluxes are changed through coiled copper wires. If we were to have a greater change in magnetic fluxes, the voltage would be stronger. For this lab, we had the following materials:

• A magnet that moves back and forth inside a coil of wire (generator).
• One voltage probe
• NXT adapter
• NXT Robot
• USB Cord
• Telephone Cable
• An Excel Spreadsheet

We had to shake the tube (generator) that contained the magnet moving back and forth inside the coil of wires. The faster the generator was shaken, the higher the voltage would be, the slower it was shaken, the lower the voltage would be.

We needed to correlate the number of shakes we did of the generator with the voltages that the generator generates.

The steps we took were as follows:

1. We shook the generator  tube at a particular rate, sometimes slower, and sometimes faster.
2. We counted the number of shakes we were able to do in 30 seconds.
3. In Excel, we calculated the sum of the squares of the voltages generated from the shakes.
4. We repeated steps 1-3 three separate times to get three rates of shakes.
5. We then created a scatter plot detailing our results.

Below are some images from the experiment:

Above is a photo of the tube with the magnet inside that moves through the copper wires.
You can also see the two copper wires around the tube; we connected those to clips that were connected to the NXT.

Above you can see the generator tube facing upward, with the two clips connected to the copper wires.

Above is an image of the NXT adapter and voltage probe.

Generator Lab Excel Spreadsheet & Data-Scatter Plot

Above is a link to our Excel spreadsheet that also contains our scatter plot of the data.