For our final project our group (leader Dana) decided that we were going to build our own mini Peltier device. After reading the guidelines for the final project and seeing Tom Vales’ presentation, we reached a group decision that a mini Peltier device would be a challenging, interesting, and fun project to work on.
This is the Peltier device that Tom Vales brought in a showed us. And we will be modeling ours somewhat after this one!
I love that we were assigned this blog because this all takes place close to where my house in New York is!
Indian Point is a nuclear power plant located on the Hudson River about 35 miles from NYC. There are two active nuclear reactors that are located there now that were built in the 70s.
The reactors currently provide 13% of the power used in new york city today. There have a lot of controversy over whether these plants should be kept open, thought they are set to close in a couple year, or if they should be shut down now. The governor of NY, Andrew Cuomo has a strong opposition towards the continuation of operations with these plants, although, mayor Bloomberg of the NYC gives his full support of keeping these plants running.
Several pros and cons play out as followed:
Pro- Carbon-free electricity
Con-Risk of catastrophe
Con- long lived nuclear waste
Con- cost
Con- uranium mining
Other thoughts:
Currently NY gets about 15% of its energy from Indian Point. If the plant ends up closing NY would then have to find somewhere else to get its power from.
20 million people live within about 50 miles of the nuclear plant- many say that in the event of a serious accident, many may not have a clear evacuation route.
References:
http://theenergycollective.com/pmlydon/78423/indian-point-nuclear-plant-unsafe
http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/nuclear-power-pro-con
http://www.acorn-online.com/joomla15/forums/2-town-issues/9123-close-indian-point.html
This past week in class we took a field trip to MIT, and took a tour of the plasma center. First we heard a lecture about plasma, what it is, and how MIT is using it. After the lecture, which informed us what a lot of scientist and MIT students are working on, we went across the street to their Alcator C-Mod lab where our tour guide spoke with us about what they are working on.
Below is a picture of their lab of computers where the scientist do a lot of their work with magnetically confined for the development of fusion energy.
Below is a picture of the bolt that keeps the whole thing together so that plasma doesnt leak out.
Below is part of their lab. We werent allowed to see the whole experiment in person because it wasnt safe but what we did see was really cool!
The lecture at the beginning explained to us how that heat up the plasma. They actually use something like a microwave to heat up the plasma but its so much hotter and they use the smallest drops ever at a time.
The students who taught us about the plasma were so informative and knowledge able. The obviously really knew what they were talking about and they did a great job explaining everything to us as well. All in all i thought it was extremely informative and such a fun field trip!
Who are they?:
mnn.com gives out the 7 surprising global warming deniers and what their reasons are!
Why they say it:
All of these sources have valid reason to believe that global warming is a myth because society give us many, but to each his own and that seems to be how these people or groups are looking at it.
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/photos/7-surprising-global-warming-deniers/related-photos
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/22/most-dangerous-global-war_n_330614.html
“Thermodynamics is the branch of physical science concerned with heat and its relation to other forms of energy and work. It defines macroscopic variables (such as temperature, entropy, and pressure) that describe average properties of material bodies and radiation, and explains how they are related and by what laws they change with time. Thermodynamics does not describe the microscopic constituents of matter, and its laws can be derived from statistical mechanics.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics
Last class we had a guest speaker, Tom Vales, who spoke to us about Sterling Engine, Peltier Junction, and Mendocino MotorScience which are thermodynamics.
With his lecture he brought several different real life examples of each one.
The above photos are shots taken of each device put to work, there is the hot fuel engine, no fuel, sterling engine. There is the tesla coil, and the Mendocino.
For the Mendocino Motor, it was created 20 years ago in CA. There are 4 solar cells, the light hits and reacts with the magnet to turn, it then floats because the magnetic force suspends it.
The Tesla Coil is a wireless transmitter of energy.
The lecture was very informative, and Mr. Vales did a great job of bringing it to life with his real life examples and hands on teaching.
This weeks lab was a solar energy lab. The point of the lab was to gain an understanding of the relationship between light intensity and the voltage output of the solar cell. And also, the relationship between the wavelength of light and the voltage output of the solar cell. Our task was to shine the light at different heights onto the solar panel that was connected to the computer, and to shine it with different color filters over it. Each height and color affected the voltage output.
Above are the results from the tests. Four different heights and four different heights. As the height increased the voltage output decreased and the opposite occurred with the light.
In regards to the colors, the red an green were extremely similar and the blue was just a little bit less.
We learned with this lab that the color filters and the height differences affected the voltage output in several different ways. And it was interesting to see the variety of results that turned up in this lab.
Solyndra is a solar panel manufacturer in California that declared bankruptcy in August 2011 laying off 1100 employees. The main problem with Solyndra, most people said, was that it looked better when it was made than when it came out onto the market. The simple design aimed to cut costs with a more simple design that cut down labor time. Obama authorized a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra in 2009 trying to increase alternative energy growth.
The failure of this, has sparked debate in Washington over Obama’s stimulus plan. After Solyndra filed for bankruptcy the loan and the supervision of the company were criticized. Solyndra’s use of the loan money was also bad mouthed. Though Solyndra had its problems, it was a stepping stone for us iun hopes to finding a better way to find better more economical ways to produce energy.
There are many ways the country can learn from the mistakes of Solyndra. Its failure shoudl be refocusing the nation and its efforts on getting general policies on the right track, developing better finance strategies, and working towards a stronger economy.
http://biggovernment.com/publius/2011/12/26/solyndra-politics-dominated-obama-energy-programs/
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/solyndra/index.html
“Hydraulic fracturing is the propagation of fractures in a rock layer caused by the presence of a pressurized fluid. Hydraulic fractures form naturally, as in the case of veins or dikes, and is one means by which gas and petroleum from source rocks may migrate to reservoir rocks.” – Online wikipedia definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
What?…. I know I know, I had no idea what that definition meant when I first read either. But don’t you readers worry! I’m hear to put hydrofracking in more understandable terms just for you!
In so many words, that definition up there is trying to say this: hydrofracking is basically the process of rocks being cracked to get to, stimulate, and release natural gas from wells. Now, after gaining this wonderful piece of knowledge, I’m sure you’e curious as to WHAT this has to do with your life. Well I will tell you.
Hydrofracking is still an act that is controversial throughout the United States. Many wish for this act to stop, for they believe that oil spills that it causes are far too dangerous. On the other hand however, despite these concerns about safety, there are a bunch of communities that depend greatly, economically, depend on the gas drilling industry itself.
VS
Recently, President Obama has said he is on board with the natural gas drilling in New York. “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy,” Obama said.”
Sources:
http://barnard.edu/events/what’s-water-worth-hydrofracking-and-its-impact-new-york-drinking-water
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20120126/NEWS01/201260327/Barack-Obama-fracturing-natural-gas-reserves
This past week in class, we worked on a project that was an energy experiment. The project played off a bit of the lego robot experiment that we worked on in previous weeks, and the way in which it went together was that we took the body part of the robot, that which held the battery, and used it to power the pulley in this project.
It was cool to see how everything we’ve done and learned so far has tied together.
To start the project we first set it up, each group had a stand with a string pulley and a set of weights, the pulley then connected to the battery from the lego robot and that then connected to the computer. We controlled the entire thing using the labview on the computer that is where we could change the speed of the pulley and if we took weight off or put weight on we would record it here so the system knew.
Some main points of the project are the following:
In this project we were exploring Newtons law F=Ma
So, the point of the project was to A) look at the mass when the power level is constant and B) look at the power level when the mass is constant.
Sadly, at the very end of our experiment we discovered something was faulty we aren’t sure whether it was the computer or the battery but something wouldn’t record correctly so we have our data that we used but it didn’t process in to an excel sheet like it was supposed to so for that, I have our professors’ examples to show you how it should of come out and looked.
We started out keeping the constant mass at .235, and we saw that the power level went to .215kg and .195 kg. and when we kept the power level constant at 5 the mass went to 75, 65, and then 55.
These are the results we would of gotten if our experiment didn’t get messed up :/
