Solar Cell Experiment

For this week’s experiment, my teammate Xiaofeng Zheng and I performed an experiment to generate a voltage using solar cells. The purpose of this experiment was to Look at what the light intensity is, how that affect the voltage we generated and look at how the color of the light affects the voltage that we generate.

In order to do it, we performed two (2) experiments followed by series of steps.  For experiment #1 we took a solar cell and a flashlight we shined on the solar cell and monitor for 30 second the amount of voltage we got as a result of it. Measured the distance of how far is the flashlight from the solar cell to obtain light intensity #1 from which we got 30 different data points from which we got the average voltage the next step to obtain a difference intensity of light we changed the distance from which the light shined to the solar cell. These steps were repeated 5 different distances in order to complete the first experiment.

The chart below demonstrates the results obtained with regard to distance and voltage (experiment #1) The five (5) different distances we used in this experiments consisted of 0 cm,  2cm, 4cm, 6 cm and 8 cm.   As we can see from the chart most of the times when we moved the distance farther away from the solar cell, the amount of voltage decreased. This is because the closer the light source to the solar cell the higher the voltage as we discussed in class.

The second experiment consisted on, using color filters (which are meant to reflex a particular color of light) We used purple, green blue and red  and measured using four (4) different color filters while maintaining 0 cm distance. The chart below represents our results with regard to the filters by looking at the chart we can see how green allowed for the highest amount of voltage, purple was the second followed by blue while red allowed for the lowest voltage. By doing this experiment we saw dependence on color of light.