Hand Crank Outline

Group: Carol Petrosyan, Julianna Akt, Maggie Morris, Ashley Remaley, and Lilian Rogers

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.

Execution : Building a LEGO Education 1B  M&M Hand Generator and have 3-4 trials of speeds.

1) To begin the experiment, the students will have to take a LEGO kit and build the hand crank by following the instructions in LEGO Education 9688 (B) booklet.  The set of instructions they should follow is 1B – Hand Generator.

2) The group must make sure the LEGO reader is charged, which they can do through the computer and the labview program that is provided.

3) After the crank has been built, the group can go onto the actual experiment. The experiment will consist of one trial with no cranking and 3 trials at various speeds in a 30 second period.

4) The group will allow for their to be one reading with no movement, which will be 0 Joules as a base.

5) After the base reading, they will do 3 seperate trials cranking slowly at first and increasing the speed each time.  We reccomend to go very slowly at first and work from there becuase it will be difficult for them to stay consistent otherwise.

6) As one member cranks, the other will read the Volts and the Watts and will record the average for each.  This should hopefully be a consistent number, but because we can not crank fast at a consistent speed as well as we do slowly, there will be some human error in the numbers.  At the end of the 30 seconds, they will also record the number in the display for the Joules, the number that we are really looking for.  They will also need to keep track of the amount of cranks (so they will have to count as they do it) and record that number for each try.

7) After all 4 trials, the group will go into Excel and record the numbers into a table that they accumulated. They will then graph the information.  The main graph that they will have is Number of Cranks Vs. Output of Energy (Joules).  If the other numbers are very askew becuase of the lack of consistency, their graphs will not come out correctly and in this case they can be discarded, or still used but with an understanding that it will not look correct.  They can make graphs such as Number of Cranks Vs. Watts, or Number of Cranks Vs. Volts.

Cranking Out Some Energy

This past week we were given our major assignment of the year in class, our lab/presentation.  I was given the position of group leader, and my group members are Ashley Remaley, Julianna Akt, Maggie Morris, and Lillian Rogers.  We gathered ‘round and started talking about what we’d be interested in.  We had some interesting ideas, but many of them didn’t end up relating to what we should have.  After discussing for awhile, we thought about doing something along the lines of the model that Tom Vales presented, the Peltier advice.  However, it seemed like others were doing the same lab, so we decided to change it.  We then decided on doing a lab like the one we had done in class with the shake lights.  Instead of using a light where the coil/magnet goes back and forth so there is a polarity change, we are using a hand crank.  We will be demonstrating the conversion of mechanical energy to electric energy because when you crank the lever, it will create energy. We can see this as a bigger picture where the energy can be used for powering products.

We will use the Lego NXT robot and have that connected to the hand crank and the computer.  This will allow for us to read the energy output by our attempts.  We will then have a set time, like the shake like experiment, possibly 30 seconds, or maybe a minute.  Within this time period, the person will have to crank the lever at a consistent speed and count it.  This will then be repeated another 3 or 4 times at varying speeds.  Have multiple tries will allow for us to see the difference between speeds in creating energy.  We will then plot them on the graph in excel and show that there should be a certain trend line, much like many others we have seen in our past experiments.

Another Fukushima Waiting to Happen?

Nuclear energy is one of the most important and useful ways to harness energy, but at the same time many people around the world are very afraid of it.  Although it may not be the cleanest it can be, quite yet, it is still the cleanest while being able to produce at any time and a lot more, unlike wind or solar energy.  The American people are especially afraid of it, even more so after the recent disaster of Fukushima.  For this reason of possible disaster, American citizens have tried to protest the opening or re-certifying of nuclear power plants.

The Indian Point Energy Center (IPEC) is a nuclear power plant in Buchanan, New York.  Its located right on the east of the Hudson River, 38 miles away from New York City (Halbfinger).  IPEC generates approximately 30% of the electricity used in NYC and and Westchester County, around 2,000 megawatts of electrical power (safesecurevital.com).  The plant is under the bigger corporation of Entergy Nuclear Northeast, who is under Entergy Corporation.

This plant obviously provides a a good amount of energy to a city that uses more energy than most.  For this reason alone, it is necessary to have nuclear energy in the area, providing the city’s energy.  Using nuclear energy to provide a quarter of the city’s energy helps the environment in numerous ways, rather than energy from coal or oil.  Because of the use of nuclear energy, the electricity that the city uses will produce less waste, helping all the surrounding areas… Like New Jersey, my home state of the Armpit of America, where most of New York’s waste goes.  I can just say that I am totally for them having less waste, so that I can hear less of the “oh NJ smells” comments, and for the health of the environment obviously.  In addition to providing cleaner energy, the power plant provides jobs to many in the area, improving the economy.  It supplies at least 1,100 people with jobs, and puts at least $200 million back into the local economy (safesecurevital.com).

The concerns, however, are that the plant is not up to date with the government’s standards and that their licenses are no longer up to date (Halbfinger).  The plant has federal licensees for their two reactors, which were built in the 70s, over 40 years ago (Halbfinger).  Because they are so old, they do not work the way the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s standards require.  This has created scared citizens and protesters, who want the plant to be shut down or want Entergy to build new reactors that will abide by the new standards.  Entergy, however, does not want, nor does it see a need to build new ones.  This is probably because it will cost the corporate about $1 billion, and will close the plant for almost a whole year, making them lose too many profits.

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).

The question now is, should the government shut the plant down or are the benefits worth the dangers?  Should it force the company to build these new reactors, whether it wants to or not?  I think that the plant can be a good use of clean energy and it could help the area in both energy and the economy.  However, I also feel that if all this is true, that it pollutes water, kills fish, and has has many problems, it should be fixed.  New reactors should be put in if it will make it safer, no matter the cost.

http://www.safesecurevital.com/#

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/nyregion/04indian.html?_r=1

http://www.shutdownindianpointnow.org/

http://www.riverkeeper.org/campaigns/stop-polluters/indian-point/radioactive-waste/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42103936/ns/world_news-asia_pacific/t/what-are-odds-us-nuke-plants-ranked-quake-risk/#.T1fpfRzyH3U

Help Save the Future

When we think MIT, we think of people being brilliant.  That is definitely what I saw on Tuesday when we went to visit the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT for a little field trip.  At the same time though, who ever knew that we had a nuclear energy contraption right in our own backyard?  It’s weird to think that students, okay MIT Ph.D. students, are working on something that could help change the world for good.  You never think that people close to our age can do things like that until you actually see it.

Lately we have been learning about the concept of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion to better understand our environment, global warming, and what our energy could be one day.  So, instead of having class this past Tuesday, we went to MIT to witness and learn about what their Ph.D. students and professors are doing to future our energy.  First off, to get to this hidden little place (which is not so little in reality) it took us quite the hike, but it was worth it.  Learning about and seeing some of the devices that the students have used there was interesting, but what made it even better where the 2 guys who took us around.  They were both so passionate and interested in what they were talking about that it made it more interesting for me.

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.

After Geoff was done explaining the background of the machine and nuclear fusion, another Ph.D. student, whose name escapes me at the moment, took us to the actual facility.  Unfortunately, after showing us some pictures and explaining the machine some more, our tour guide realized that the actual machine is inaccessible at that point.  It had to undergo routine maintenance, where they had to re-calibrate the lasers in the machine that detect the heat of the plasma.

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.

Towards the end of the tour, our guide informed us that sadly their fusion program will most likely be cut next year by the Obama administration.   Because of the numerous budget cuts and the new ITER project (which we are partially funding), the funding for projects such as this has been minimized.  As a result, they have decided to cut the one at MIT because it is mostly ran by Ph.D. and graduate students, rather than real scientists, like other programs around the country.  This means that the Alcator C-Mod would be shut down, like the other 2 machines he showed us.  They felt that it was more important to keep those programs going, even though the MIT one has invaluable information that helps the future of the energy world.  Many of the results that these Ph.D. students extricate from the Alcator C-Mod are ones that can actually help to modify and better more powerful tokamaks, like ITER.  He was very passionate about this and the fact that by this time next year, they may no longer have this facility and students like him will no longer have such an amazing opportunity to work on something this important.  He also mentioned that their facility, although it is rather small in comparison to other ones, produces some of the most information for its size.  It has the highest magnetic field of any fusion center around the world (and its smaller than other centers), which seems likea prime reason to keep it going in my opinion.  It is such a tough time for our economy and our government in making decisions regarding budgets.  Before the tour I can say with certainty, I would have never thought to fight for the students at MIT to have the program keep going, because I, like many other people think that this is not as important as other problems at this time.  However, after our tour guide showed us the facility, what they do and essentially campaigned for the program to stay open I can see myself turning to their side.

To get mor information about their project and to udnerstand why we should help them keep this program running, go to http://www.psfc.mit.edu/index.html