Final Project Outline

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.