During our group’s first brainstorming session, we came up with multiple ideas for what experiment we could perform on sustainability. I immediately remember doing an experiment in the past on static electricity. A bi-product of static electricity is an electrical discharge, for example lightning strikes. At the Museum of Science there is a room that generate vast amounts of static electricity to create lightning. After doing research on static discharge online, we found the balloon experiment. This consisted of a balloon, and faucet. Our group decided that this was going to an interesting experiment to perform.

Tom Vales came to our class and presented various inventions that he has created in the past. The devices he presented to us were the Peltier Device, Stirling Engine, Mendocino Engine, and a Tesla Coil.

Peltier Device – Thermoelectric cooling uses the Peltier effect to create a heat flux between the junction of two different types of materials. A Peltier cooler, heater, or thermoelectric heat pump is a solid-state active heat pump which transfers heat from one side of the device to the other, with consumption of electrical energy, depending on the direction of the current.

Stirling Engine – A Stirling engine is a heat engine operating by cyclic compression and expansion of air or other gas, the working fluid, at different temperature levels such that there is a net conversion of heat energy to mechanical work. Or more specifically, a closed-cycle regenerative heat engine with a permanently gaseous working fluid, where closed-cycle is defined as a thermodynamic system in which the working fluid is permanently contained within the system, and regenerative describes the use of a specific type of internal heat exchanger and thermal store, known as the regenerator.

Mendocino Engine – The motor consists of a four-sided rotor block in the middle of a shaft. The rotor block has two sets of windings and a solar cell attached to each side. The shaft is positioned horizontally and has a magnet at each end. The magnets on the shaft provide levitation by repelling magnets in a base under the motor. There is an additional magnet that sits under the rotor block and provides a magnetic field for the rotor.

When light strikes one of the solar cells, it generates an electric current thus energizing one of the rotor windings. This produces a magnetic field which interacts with the field of the magnet under the rotor. This interaction causes the rotor to turn. As the rotor rotates, the next solar cell moves into the light and energizes the second winding, creating a current in an opposite direction to the first thus maintaining the rotation. This process repeats as the motor spins.

Tesla Coil – A Tesla coil is an electrical resonant transformer circuit invented by Nikola Tesla around 1891.It is used to produce high-voltage, low-current, high frequency alternating-current electricity.

Tesla coils can produce higher voltages than electrostatic machines, which are another source of artificial high-voltage discharges. Tesla experimented with a number of different configurations consisting of two, or sometimes three, coupled resonant electric circuits.