Natural gas hydraulic fracturing or hydrofracking for short, is an alternative method of extracting natural gas from the Earth’s crust. The way that hydrofracking works is that a water and chemical mixture are shot down a well at very high pressures. This process creates “fractures” to release the desired natural gas from the rocks.

Many people are strongly apposed to hydrofracking due to the fact that this method of natural gas extraction requires a lot of water. The problem lies in where all of this water is going to come from and where it is going to go once it has been used? The fear is that the water in close proximity of hydrofracking operations becomes contaminated with toxic chemicals that are very harmful to humans. This is why communities protest against hydrofracking and why it is such a controversial issue. 

New York has been at the very center of this hydrofracking controversy. . The area that is of most concern is called, Marcellus Shale and is land that that the gas companies desperately want to take over for their fracking operations. On February 22, 2012 a NY state judge ruled that Individual towns have the right to decide if they will allow hydrofracking or not. This is a win for environmentalist and those living in NY. On the other hand, it enrages the drillers. This is an ongoing battle and it will be interesting to see what transpires in the months and years to come. 

Resources: 
http://www.citizenscampaign.org/campaigns/hydro-fracking.asp
http://www.safewatermovement.org/what-is-hydrofracking/

Last week on 2/17 we said goodbye to our robots and learned all about solar panels. We got the opportunity to conduct a “Solar Cell Experiment” and in this post I will share with you what my partner and I did, and the data we collected, so you can learn a little about solar cells as well!

The procedure of this experiment was to:

(1) Measure solar cell voltages (aka the light intensity) without any light

(2) Repeat the measurements for the solar cell being placed at different distances from the light source

(3) And lastly, to measure the cell voltage at a fixed distance for 4 different colored filters

Below is a diagram of the setup of the experiment:

So, once we were all set up we began running the test. As the procedure states we first ran a trial where no light was shining on the cell so we could get an idea of what the baseline reading would be. All of the data was saved for us in the Labview program as usual and we were then able to open it up in excel and do the necessary computing. Next, we conducted 5 additional tests placing the cell at varying distances from the light sources (which was like a fancy flashlight).

The data averages for these trials are depicted below:

As you can see the trend of this data was that as the distance of the cell from the light source decreased that voltages recorded increased.

After we were done with this preliminary part of the experiment we moved on to using the 4 different color filters. Alex and I chose to use the light pink, hot pink, yellow, orange, and blue filters at the fixed distance of 5 cm from the light source.

These data averages are as follows:

color volts blue 0.22908 orange 0.265004 yellow 0.257306 hot pink 0.273985 light pink 0.262438
As you can see when we used the hot pink filter, we generated the most voltage while when we used the blue, we generated the least. This finding goes against what I would think the results would have presented because aren’t the darkest colors supposed to attract the most light? Isn’t that why we are are told not to wear black in the summer time? I would think that when we used no filter the most volts would have been generated followed by the yellow filter because that would have been the lightest color. Unless our data was not completely correct I am not quite sure what conclusions I can draw from this.

Not soon after President Obama was elected in 2009 he presented a plan that included loaning billions of dollars to “green” energy companies. The intentions behind this plan was to help the U.S. move in the direction of being less dependent upon fossil fuels. Additionally, the thought was that these “green” energy companies would also provide jobs for Americans. It seems like a good idea right…?

Well in theory, yes! But, here is what actually unfolded that is refered to as the Solyndra Scandal. Solyndra was a company that produced solar-panels and they receives $535 million of this billion dollar loan. They were loaned this money in March of 2009 and by the end of August, that same year, they were filing for bankrupcy and abruptly stopped all of their manufacturing of panels!

Above is a picture of the President touring the Solyndra plant in California.

After the company’s downward spiral many investigations were conducted by Federal agencies and The House of Energy and Commerce Committee. The Obama administration was largley criticized for failing to see that the company was expereincing problems before they even recieved the loan. Also, one of the main financial backers of Solyndra was found to have had ties to the Obama campaign; this just added to the scandal.

It appears that investigations are still underway and the public is not yet fully aware of everything that transpired. In September, 2011 federal agents went to the houses of Solyndra’s CEO and founder to look at files and documents they had in their possession.  Although this whole situation seems like a huge failure because it essentailly wasted a significant amount of tax payer’s money the President and his administration say that the economy and companies in general are very unpredictable. They go on to atest that the failure of one company should not deter the U.S. from trying to become less dependent on fossil fuels and more environmetnally friendly. This seems like a fair statement but after all that occured surrounding Solyndra I think it is going to take a lot more than just words to have the American people trust, and be on board with another “green” plan anytime soon.

References:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/solyndra-scandal-timeline/

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/abc-news-investigations-year-solyndra-scandal/story?id=15199603#.T0e0GyOa1uU

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904836104576558763644374614.html

On 2/10 in class we completed the week 4 Generator Experiment. For this experiment we were using Lego Mindstorm along with a hand generator and voltage probe.
This is what the set up was like:

And here is an actual picture of it:

We learned that inside of the generator was a magnet and coil mechanism that when shaken generated power. So, once we had everything set up and connected we were ready to begin running our 5 separate tests. For each test we had to start Labview for 30 seconds, shake the generator, and count the number of shakes. As I said, we did this 5 separate times. The first time we didn’t shake the generator at all and each time after that we increased the shaking speed. 

After all of our tests had been executed we were able to transfer this data into excel. For each test there were 30 seperate voltages recorded. For each of these we added them togather and squared them giving us one number to work with for each of the 5 test trials.

The data looked like this:

We also made a graph of this data:

 As you can see the faster we shook the hand held genrator the higher the voltage.

This lab was important because it teaches us that there are alternative ways to produce energy that are much more environmentally friendly. Maybe in the future we will all have hand held generators that we can power electornics like our cell phones and computers with!

Again we were working with our Lego robots in class but this time they looked a little bit different (see picture below).

During this experiment, we were using our robot mechanisms to lift up a set of weights. The key things to know about this experiment is that the force was controlled by the robots. This is what enabled them to lift the mass which was the weights. Additionally, we found after numerous tests that as the mass or the weights increased the acceleration, or the time it took them to reach the top of the pulley system decreased.

We ran a test for all of the different weights. The different weights were what we had to plug into the labview panel measured in kilograms. After each of the tests were run the data was computed for us by the program. After all of the tests we were able to import all of this data into an excel spreadsheet. Look below to see the data:

As you can see we ran 12 separate tests. The data helped us to discover the trend that was mentioned before, how as the mass of the weights increased the acceleration decreased. We created a graph to show this relationship:

The next and final step in the lab was to calculate the potential energy for each of the tests. The formula we were given for potential energy is as follows:

mgh (potential energy)=m(mass) x a(acceleration) x h(height)

The mass was always 9.8m

and the height of the pulley system was always .22m

Therefore for example, for test 1 the mass of the weights was equal to .25kg so we computed:

.25kg x 9.8m x .22m

and came out with .539 being the potential energy for this test.