The first day, professor Greg Sonek chose the working groups, we have to present our final experiment. It has to be related to something we have seen in class.
The next day, after a wonderful experiment done in class, my colleagues and I initiated the group brainstorm about our final project. The truth is that the three of us got a lot of interesting ideas, but not all were valid. We had to find an experiment that we could perform in class, while allowing us to take a series of measurements about what we were showing.
Some of the ideas we had was to create our own stirling heat engine or use the power of steam of a pressure pot to make a series of measurements. However we decided to test the efficiency of different types of light bulbs. For this we’ll need several things: a hand crank generator, different types of bulbs, a DC power supply and a voltmeter.
So, what we decided is to build our own hand crank generator, then we connect the different light bulbs to it one by one. We turn the crank generator and we see how easy it is to light up the light bulbs. To make the experiment measurable, we replace the crank generator for a DC power supply. To find out the voltage needed to turn the bulbs on, we’ll use a voltmeter, so we can calculate the efficiency.