Electricity Experiment

This week in Energy & Sustainability class we held an experiment to see how generators functions with turbines to produce electricity. We gathered some instruments that would help us find out the relationship in generators and turbines. Experiment: For our experiment we had a flashlight that didn’t operate on batteries. It had a coil of wire in the middle of the flashlight and an metal object would produce voltage when it was passed through the the coil of wire. To create electricity all one need to do was to shake the flashlight. After shaking the flashlight for a while we turned the light on it was bright, after a while the light dimmed and finally went out. We hypothesized that the more times the flashlight was shaken the more voltage that will be produced and the brighter the light will be. We hooked the flashlight up to the computer and it recorded how voltage was created when we shook the flashlight. We ran 3 different tests. Test 1: Shake the flashlight 60 times in 30 seconds (2 shakes every second) Test 2: Shake the flashlight 45 times in 30 seconds (1 and a half shake every second) Test 3: Shake the flashlight 30 times in 30 seconds (1 shake every second) Test 4: Shake the flashlight 15 times in 30 seconds (half a shake per second) After doing all these tests the excel file provided us with the data that we put on the table below.

Analyzing the Data:

The table shows what we got from shaking the flashlight for a specific amount of times. You may notice that there are a lot of negative numbers in the data but it doesn’t matter negative numbers only tell you what direction the voltage was flowing in. I simply ignored the negative signs and added them up for the total voltage produced.

Summing it all up we too the total voltages produced and placed them on another table according to the number of shakes. (shown below)

Using the table we made in excel we turned it into a graph to see if there were patterns and relationships between the voltage produced and the number of shakes. (shown below)

Looking at the graph we can tell that the relationship is definitely not linear. It looks more like an exponential relationship. In conclusion at the end we proved our theory right: that the more times we shake it the more voltage gets produced and the brighter the flashlight is. The graph proves the theory correct. Good job team!