Day: November 20, 2015

We had many ideas, and being very overzealous, along our brainstorming we were even considering building a hovercraft that that would fly using sensors and be powered through solar energy. Needless to say, that plan fell through very quickly. We went through many other possible ideas, some being similar with only minor differences, and some completely different ideas. Here are some of the ideas we were considering:

• Magnet/Transformer Generator
• Fruit Power
• Building Solar panels
• Building a Wind turbine
• Build a motor
• Remote control car, runs on solar or wind
• Solar Powered hovercraft
• Catapult
• Hovercraft Sensor

Our decision was based on price, our resources, and time to build. As much as I would have love to build a hovercraft that runs on solar power, the price to make one out of good material that would be durable could be expensive. But also it could take a long time to make it, and considering we have 3 weeks to get all the materials, build the device, test it to make sure it works properly, and then run the actual experiments, and then prepare the presentation. It would all take too long.

 

Our final decision was a final combination of a few of our ideas. We are going to build a solar powered toy car. This seemed like the most reasonable and doable device we could build. Once we had an idea we then had to decide how to build it. Our final decision was to order a few inexpensive kits to build solr powered cars, because it would be more durable than making our own makeshift cars out of plastic bottles or whatever else we could use.

With our solar powered toy cars built, we will finally be able to proceed with our experiments. Our experiment will have 2 parts: Toy Car Velocity vs Light Intensity and Toy Car Velocity vs Color Filter. In addition to the experiment, one of my intentions for the project overall is to demonstrate how useful solar energy can be, and that with advancing technolgies, rather than powering a toy car with solar energy, we will be able to power real cars with solar energy.

 

Part 1: Car Velocity vs Light Intensity

How we plan to complete this part of this experiment isn’t too difficult. Once the toy car is built we will use a light intensity meter to measure the cars velocity. The way that will be completed is setting a fixed distance, and then timing how fast it covers said distance, thus allowing us to calculate a velocity. The light inesity meter will allow us to read the strength of the sunlight, and from there we will be able to plot them against each other, and then anaylyze the data to give us a correlation between the two variables.

 

Part 2: Car Velocity vs Color Filter

This part is even easier because all we have to do is attach different color filters over the solar panel to convert the sunlight from white light to other color. The reason for this being to see what color solar panels pick up the best. We did an experiment like this in class, but my reasoning for doing this with toy cars is because comparing the effects of color filters to a cars velocity is a lot easier to grasp and understand than some numbers that our outputted on a computer program. It is a visual aid versus just giving data. Once we plot velocity vs color on a bar graph, it should give us some type of bell curve or some other correlation so that we can determine which wavelength is truly the best for solar energy.