Final Experiment Blog
After weeks of working on our experiment, we are finally here, The End. A bittersweet end, if I do say so myself. It was fun working on the project together and getting to do our own thing, but eventually things tend to tire you out, whether it is a science experiment or your favorite food. So its nice to see this be done, but sad as well. As we have already showed and mentioned before, our experiment was the Hand Crank Lab.
The idea behind it was to see how much manual work we, as human beings, would have to put into this little crank to get some electrical energy out of it. We wanted to see this because, as the world grows and ages, we are slowly depleting it of its resources and destroying it at the same time. With this type of work and energy, we see that there is no waste at the end that can contribute to that. We hope that eventually companies that make stationary bicycles and other equipment of that sort will begin to make energy efficient ones where the exorcise the person does can be used to charge their phone or some other small electronic. Even though this is such a small thing, it can eventually make a different if we all contribute to it, and it will ultimately save money and energy all around.
To understand how we came to this conclusion, the following blog with include the different items that we did through the weeks as well as results and thoughts others had. To differentiate between the different sections in our experiment, we used different font colors; so this would be an introduction, while the black font is the lab, and so forth.
Hand Crank Experiment Lab
Group: Carol Petrosyan, Julianna Akt, Maggie Morris, Ashley Remaley, and Lilian Rogers
Background: An electric generator is a machine that converts mechanical energy to electrical energy. A generator works by forcing and electrical charge through an external electrical circuit. It is similar to a water pump, causing water to flow. The source of our mechanical energy came from the cranking.
The first electrical generator was invented by Michael Faraday which he named Faraday’s Disk. The disk uses a copper disk that routes between the poles of a magnet. However, this design was inefficient because it had a counter flow current. Today’s designs still follow the same basic principle of having a magnet and some sort of metal or other object, where one will rotate/move back and forth while the other stays stationary. This movement creates polarity by changing the current repeatedly and the more you do this, the more energy that will come out of the work that you put in.
Equipment
- Lego Mindstorm Kit
- One NXT Energy Meter
- LEGO Education 9688 (B) Booklet
*NXT Energy Meter may need charging between uses.
Procedure
1) Take a LEGO kit and build the hand crank by following the instructions in LEGO Education 9688 (B) booklet. Follow set of instructions 1B – Hand Generator. Because we do not have the actual kits, it will be necessary to improvise, so follow the picture model in the powerpoint.
2) Make sure the LEGO reader is charged, which can be done through the computer and the Labview program provided. Once NXT Energy Meter is charged, make sure the screen is cleared by holding down the green button until there is a 0 Joules reading on the screen.
3) Allow for one reading with no movement as a base, which will be 0 Joules.
4) After the base reading, do four separate trials cranking slowly at first and increasing the speed each time. It is recommended that cranking is begun very slowly at first and slowly increased with each trial. The powerpoint shows the approximate speeds to follow to achieve maximum results, but are not definite.
5) As one student cranks they must count the number of cranks during the 30 second trial and record the number. Another student will read the Volts on the NXT Energy Meter display and will record an average number for each. At the end of the 30 seconds, record the number in the display for Joules. Press and hold the green reset button between each trial.
6) After all four trials and the base reading, go into Excel and record the numbers into a table. Then graph the following information: The main graph is Number of Cranks Vs. Output of Energy (Joules), also construct Number of Cranks Vs. Volts. Although both of these show essentially the same thing, one determines the total output of energy created from the cranks while the other will help with your consistency.
*There should be a positive trend in the Cranks Vs. Output of Energy (Joules) if the experiment has been conducted successfully.
Main Goal: Create sustainable energy through a hand crank/generator. This will be manually turned and thus will create energy without waste to be converted. The second purpose is to see the difference in energy output through different speeds.
A link to how the actual experiment works and what it should look like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCoVoF3sgo0
Unfortunetly, our powerpoint will not load onto the blog, so I have provided pictures of the important slides:
As you can see, we detrmined that the faster you crank, the more energy will be created. The graph with the Volts is to show the instantaneous energy/work that you have put into the crank and the reader. This helps you to see how consistant you are and how much work it takes to yeild the amount of Joules that you will have at the end. So in a realistic setting, an actual person cranking would not yeild many Joules, but if someone were to be riding a bicycle, more Joules would be created.
After creating, doing, and presenting the lab to the class, we then allowed a group to do it. We worked with two groups, the Solar Oven and the Peltier Device groups. After doing the experiment, the members told us what they thought we could improve and work on.
One major difficulty we found when our other classmates tried out our experiment was the effectiveness of the handle on the crank. The LEGO education kit did not include the accurate handle to the crank. We attached a longer Lego piece in place of the handle. With that, we found that the students had difficulty when they were cranking it at a higher speed because of the lightness of the Lego piece. At times it would spin out and not be as smooth when tried at a lower speed causing the students to lose count in their cranks. For the future, we would attach a more stable handle so that students would be able to accurately account the number of cranks the count, as well as go at a more consistent speed. Other than the little problem of trying to stay consistant, the other teams seemed to like and understand the experiment. They yeilded the correct results, for the most part their numbers coincided with ours. Just like ours, the first 2 times didn’t yield and large number of Joules because the readers rounds up and down. As they cranked faster towards the end, they finally got some Joules out of it and saw the results that they were looking for. Furthermore, they understood what the purpose of the experiment was and how it can be important to sustainability in the future.
The plant also pollutes the water in the Hudson and as a result kills many fish in the river. As a nuclear plant, it needs water to cool the reactors, and because of its proximity to the Hudson, it uses the river’s water. This wouldn’t be such a problem, however, it puts the water back into the river after it is done using it (Riverkeeper.org). This water now has radioactive material in it that then pollutes the rest of the water. This polluted water kills fish, specifically the shortnose sturgeon, which is an endangered species (Halbfinger). Along with the killing of fish and polluting of water, it has had past problems with explosions, radioactivity leakage, and other dangerous events (shutdownindianpointnow.org). Lastly, according to the USGS the most dangerous nuclear plant in all of America is Indian Point (Dedman). This is because it has the highest chance of a being hit by an earthquake, since it lies between 2 faults (Dedman).
Once we got there we had a little bit of a background powerpoint presentation by Geoff, a 4 year Ph.D. student who has worked at the facility during his time at MIT. He showed us the basics of nuclear atoms and what happens depending on the molecule and the actions around those molecules. Besides the basics of fusion, which we had learned in class already, Geoff explained to us the problem that they at MIT, and essentially everyone attempting nuclear fusion is facing. This is the concept of confinement time. The first problem they had was the container in which to hold the plasma, which they fixed when they created the tokamak and placed the currents into the plasma, which allowed for them to control how the plasma moves within the Alcator C-Mod. This however led to that next problem of the confinement time, which is that the plasma has a confinement time of 1/1000 sec, where they need it to be one second. Essentially, they need to create a tokamak that will allow the plasma to stay heated at extremely high temperatures while moving around the tokamak to allow for fusion, without dispersing its heat to quickly.
This then led us to ITER. ITER is the newer, bigger, and essentially better version of the Alcator C-Mod at MIT. ITER will be built in France and will be funded by a multitude of countries, including the United States. It seems that they hope to have a confinement time of over one second, which will be an outstanding breakthrough for everyone and for nuclear fusion.
Because of how sensitive this calibration is, people were not allowed into the actual room where the tokamak was. Instead we got to to see some of the graphs, information, and a visual of the inside of the machine where the plasma is, as well as a scaled replica of the bolts that they use to keep the tokamak in place. These bolts are huge and powerful, a space shuttle needs 2 of them to stay down, but the tokamak is so powerful that it needs 96. Because the Alcator C-Mod was inaccessible for the time being, he showed us some of their older experiments and projects. I did not catch the name of them, however, one of them had to do with levitation, which in itself is pretty awesome.
Many of these global warming deniers are politicians and lobbyists in politics, while some are scientists that seem to ignore what their given profession is obviously showing. Politicians like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michael Steele and news-anchors/writers like George Will, Stephen Moore and Fred Barnes are all global warming Deniers (Shapiro). Many of these people are not scientists, so they have not done research themselves nor do they truly know the scientific background to global warming or greenhouse gasses. They are all influential, however, because of their political side of knowing how to persuade people. Sadly, we should all know that politicians will do anything to get what they want and much of it is lying and deceitful, so we should steer clear of listening to them. Much of them want to not have the government spend money on alternative ways to oil or coal, since we rely so much on them and we make so much money in the industries that use them. If we have to start putting so much money into creating an alternative, we ultimately lose money (even though we end up saving the Earth.. but who cares right?). The real problem is those scientists that do have a background in the situation that still don’t feel that it is happening. Many of these scientists, such as David Bellamy or Richard Lindzen, believe the same as Roy Spencer, who I talk about later. They feel that the climate changes naturally without the help of humans and that we can be blamed for it solely (Shapiro). Lindzen sees that it is not surprising that warming is occurring since we just came out of a little ice age in the 19th century, yet again a natural thing (Lindzen). People like Lindzen, Bellamy, Freeman Dyson, Garth Paltridge, and many others, are dangerous because they can either prove or disprove with their research or the lack of other scientist’s research. It seems that many of them do not necessarily object Global warming 100%, but rather they feel that there just is not enough concrete research and information to prove that it is anthropogenic. We all know that scientists need hard proof, not just something hypothetical or possible, so if the scientists that do believe in it can find that one little thing that will prove it to the rest, I think that the amount of global warming deniers that are scientists will go down.
The Peltier Device/Effect, or a thermoelectric device/effect, is an interesting concept to learn. The device consisted of two cups, on with hot water and one with cold water (two different temperatures), with a metal contraption that had two panels, each jutting out into the water in the separate cups. The way that this device creates electricity is that voltage is created because of the two different temperatures, the metal touching the two cups of water generates the voltage and then energy. We saw this because there was a windmill-like fan on the top of the metal that would spin as a result of the two different temperatures touching the metal and generating that voltage. We also saw that by the end of the demonstration, the wheel had stopped spinning because the two cups of water had now reached the same temperature. Because of this, no voltage was being created.
Like the previous device, the next one, the Sterling Device/Engine is run by heat energy that turns into mechanical work. Air or gas is compressed in a cyclical way and at different temperatures so that there is a conversion of the heat energy created to mechanical work, that will run the engine or machine attached. The engine has been around for a long time and in the later 20th century it was used in some radios and products made by Philips, the electronics company. Now the device is used to power generators and have solar components as well. The last little device that Tom Vales showed was the Mendocino Motor. The motor has solar cells that are attached, and when light hits the solar cell it creates an electrical current which then creates a magnetic field that will interact with the magnets that are alas attached at the ends. This interaction makes the other solar cell go into the light and this repetitive motion makes the motor turn and work.
As we watched him put different things near the coil we all wondered if he could feel the electricity and current that went into the pole, because you would think he could. When he asked if anyone wanted to test it out, my hand shot up so quickly, I thought it was detached from my body. I love participating in experiments and getting to actually experience them, so I tend to always volunteer myself for things like this. In physics in high school we had an experiment with a bowling ball attached to the ceiling that we would let go at a certain point and would swing right in front of the person’s face, but would stop before hitting the person who was sitting down on the floor. That was a scary moment of my life because you think its seriously going to hit your face, and I certainly thought so when I was the person sitting there. So getting to use the Tesla Coil was really exciting for me. When I put the pole near the coil, I couldn’t feel a thing running through the pole or through me, but the light bulb was lighting up. Pretty awesome in opinion, if I do say so myself.
