Generator Lab

Okay, picture this:

There’s a power outage and you’re left stranded in the dark. No electricity so no lights. It has fallen to you to reset the breaker, meaning you have to go down cellar, fumble through various objects without hurting yourself, and flip the right switch. This would be alright if you could see in the dark, but lets face it, you can’t. Luckily, you have the means to generate your own electricity. How you say? Well with a special kind of flashlight of course. With just a few shakes you’re able to generate electricity, power the battery, and produce light! (For the sake of this introduction, all the batteries you own are dead or you just don’t believe in batteries because they cost too much and aren’t friendly to the environment)

This little yet useful tool is the product of understanding the science behind magnets and electrical currents. The flashlight is a generator just like any other, only it’s a hand held one. Instead of the initial energy being provide by steam, coal, or other sources, the initial energy is supplied by you, specifically, the motion of your arm when you shake it. The lab I preformed sought to graph this production of man-made electricity.

The Technology

First, before I talk about the experiment, I want to quickly discuss how the technology works. This understanding, as originally provided by Michael Faraday, is needed to know just what’s happening with each shake of the magnet.

It begins with a magnet and a wire. Faraday discovered that by passing a conductive wire through a magnetic field an electric current was produced. Furthering his discovery, he found out that by spinning a coil of wire around a magnet, a steady electrical current could be produced. What this means is that he could convert the energy used to spin the coil, mechanical energy, into electrical energy.

The Experiment

Taking this knowledge and applying it to the flashlight, the mechanical energy being used, by us, to shake the coil inside the flashlight is being converted to electrical energy which is in turn powering the lightbulb so it can produce light. What my experiment sought to graph was the correlation between the number of shakes made and the amount of electricity being produced. Below you can see the graph of the data findings.

First taking a reading of the voltage with no shakes, it comes at no surprise that there is an insignificant amount of electrical energy. Without any shakes there is no energy to be converted. Next, the flashlight was shaken 15 times, producing a voltage of 5.1. The third recording was shaken 30 times, and to my dismay what can only be thought of as an inaccurate reading produced a voltage read out of 3.5. The recording was back on track though with a fourth recording of 60 shakes with a voltage reading of 60.4, and then a fifth recording of 120 shakes with a voltage reading of 103.5.

As you can see from the data collected, the more mechanical energy used, or shakes of the magnet, the more electrical energy being produced.

Sources

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/travel/hand-powered-generators.htm