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.