In this lab we were charged with the duty of running a generator powered off of our own bodily energy. For this lab we used the Lego Mindstorm technology and software to power and capture our results. We were given a flashlight looking device that housed the generator, a magnet that passes through coils and the change in current creates power, and we needed to shake the device to move the magnet and create the energy. This lab illustrated to me the way in which a generator works, and how many times that the magnet must pass through the coils in order to generate a good amount of power.  We did six trials and used varied amounts of shakes in each trial, then we took that data and sumsquared it. Here is our data and results:

data from lab. Shakes vs. Sumsquared

For our first test we did a trial without shaking the generator at all. What I found to be interesting is that the generator was still able to generate some power, albeit a very low amount. I am not entirely sure why this is, but I suspect that it is because there is some pent up energy left within the coil from the last run or while the magnet was running through the coils before we started the trial.

Something that I find interesting as well is the fact that every trial that we did produced more energy than the last, despite the fact that we did not increase the number of shakes that we did each time, sometimes we did less shakes. This, similar to why not shaking the device at all yielded some energy gain, I feel is because there was some pent up energy left in the generator from the previous trials.

graph showing number of shakes on the X axis and the sumsquared on the Y axis.

A challenge that we encountered in the process of doing this lab was in collecting the data. I found it incredibly hard to count the number of times that I shook the device, especially when we were attempting to maximize the shaking. Because of that, some of ‘the number of shakes’ might be estimations of how many times the device was shaken. This perhaps could have hindered the data in some way. However this lab was a lot of fun and did a very good job of helping us understand exactly how a generator works.