This Solar Cell lab was the most interesting and easy to understand labs yet. The goal was to record how much energy is emitted when a flash light is held to a solar cell, the distance away our flash light was, is our variable.
For the first part of the lab we recorded the distance away from the solar cell and changes in voltages. In ten second intervals we recorded changes in voltage by the solar cell. First we recorded the solar cell when there was no light coming through, face down on the table to show our starting data point. After that we recorded the voltage when the flash light was directly against our solar panel. By doing these two things it gives us a range in which we can expect our data points to fall.
After changing the distance away we held our flash light for ten seconds, we averaged the voltage for each second to receive one data point. by doing this we can create a visual representation of the decrease in average voltages when we increase the distance our flash light is from the solar cell, therefore decreasing light intensity.
Our data points for our four trials are as follows:
| Distance | Average voltage |
| 0 | 0.60115 |
| 0.03 | 0.469187 |
| 0.06 | 0.466621 |
| 0.09 | 0.461489 |
| 0.12 | 0.454888 |
The second half of the lab included getting data points when the flashlight was directly against the solar cell but with changing colored films in front of the solar cell. We did this to see the impact of color in relation to its wavelengths to the energy received by the solar cell. This concept is based on our in class lecture. we can see below that color has a huge impact on wavelengths of light red yellow and orange produce longer wavelengths while violet and blue produce shorter ones.
Our colored sheets where green, blue , yellow and pink. We could already predict that the pink and yellow sheets would produce longer wave lengths, therefore more voltage. Similarly to out first part of the lab we recorded ten data points and averaged them to get a single data point for each color. these results can be seen bellow.
| Green | 0.551113 | ||
| Blue | 0.457454 | ||
| Yellow | 0.565226 | ||
| Pink | 0.486963 | ||
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through this lab we can understand how both distance and color have an effect on solar cells intensity.