Tom Vales Archer 332

These are just some notes I took while listening to Tom Vales’ Presentation.

Nikola Tesla; High voltage, solar; Sterling engine 1816; locomotives with steam engines- very dangerous; hot air engines- top piece cold bottom hot; medizino motor- 4 solar panels- magnetic field holding everything together; electrostatic motor; st elmo fire; xenon; tesla coil- violet ray- electrodes; Dr Zeus- terry blake; Eddy currents

I learned alot about the dangers of high voltage power while Tom Vales was talking in class. He talked alot about the Nikola Tesla and the inventions he created. He would talk about locomotive steam engines and how dangerous they were because the pressure from the steam if not released properly could create a huge explosion and could kill many people. He brought a tesla coil to class and showed off how it could power many items as florescent lightbulbs. He told us about how the violet ray from the tesla coil work and how they were the source of the power. The way they would light power the light is the violet rays would activate the electrodes in the lightbulb and the bulb would light up. I took videos of him working on the tesla coil but they were erased. His presentation was very interesting and you could tell that he loved his work. The way he talked about it showed how passionate he was.

These here are the results for the shake generator experiment. As you can tell in the graph, the faster and harder you shake the generator the more power it creates. The way this experiment worked was with a flashlight-looking shake generator being shook for about 30-35 secs with different speeds for each trial. First time we didn’t shake it at all then the next trials went up to 18, 40, 125, 240 shakes. In the graph itself we compared the sum of squares of voltages that the generator gave off. We used Labview to get the number of how much power each shake gave off. This experiment was interesting because you got to see how much power was generated through just shaking an object.

P.S. Sorry the picture is hard to see I tried my best to fix it but it did not want to come out properly.

The way my group was brainstorming is that we were trying to come up with a project that would relate to sustainability the most. At first, it was difficult. We would look online for different ideas and see what was out there at the time for projects about solar power, hydroelectric power and anything else we could find. We want to have one cool project to present to the class. Alas, we came up with the idea of using light bulbs as a heat source and see which wattage came up with the most heat. We found an example of the project online and went off of that as our base. We had to come up with other ways of doing the experiment so that we could get positive results so we just changed where the light bulbs would be hitting the thermometer and how far away it was. After that, it was smooth sailing, with the help of Professor Shatz of course.