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.