This week on our hands-on class activity, once again using the NXT Lego robot, we created a generator. In this week’s activity the set up changed once again, this time the set up consisted of the following: 1 generator which contained a magnet inside which moved back and forth inside a coil of wire, then we had a voltage probe which provides the voltage being created through friction, one Nxt adaptor, and at last the main key by which everything evolves around in all our hands on activity or atleast for now, the Nxt robot.
Bit different from the past couple of week’s, this time the procedure was different, in this lab we where the ones who had to shake the generator, a tube which had a magnet inside and that by traveling back and forth through the coil wires we would create changes in the magnetic flux, and by soo, creating energy.
Now the instructions where the next :
-Shake the tube at a particular rate.
-Count the number of shakes in the data collecting interval (set to 30 seconds)
-Calculate in Excel the sum of the squares of the voltages (SSV’s) (the voltage is logged after each second)
-Plot the SSQV’s as a function of # of shakes and fit the result to a linear curve
At first me and my team-mate where more than frustated hahah, we had to figth around with our computer for 20 or so minutes hahahah, until we finally where able to open the virtual lab, once we had all the tecnical stuff down we started with our 1st run, without shaking it we let the computer and robot record the energy being created without us creating any friction by shaking the generator. From then on we just kept escalating from a lower range of shakes in the 30 seconds we had, to the hisghest range of shakes in our last run. (here is the data we recolected)
shakes Sum of squares
run 1 0 0.405376545
run 2 40 102.0386884
run 3 70 209.9912604
run 4 120 298.7808609
run 5 145 370.2757052
By looking at the table above, we can notice how by raising the number of shakes in 30 seconds (shaking it faster), the sum of the squares was raised too. For thouse of you who migth not know what the sum of squares is, its nothing complicated, its just the addition of all the waves and different voltages created by shaking the generator in that 30 second time period.
Overall, this experiment testing Faradays Law was pretty interesting and fun. It’s main objective was to understand that changes in the magnetic environment of a coil of wire will cause voltage to be induced in the coil, which was more than proved since we could notice that the greater the change in the magnetic flux due to the shakening of the generator, the greater the currents and voltages been generated where, and that either small or large there was always something produced by the movement.
