Intro:
The purpose of this lab was to demonstrate Faraday’s Law, which states, “changing magnetic fluxes through coiled wires generate electricity.” In order to prove this we enlisted the help of a generator in the form of flashlight. Its usual battery-operated insides had been replaced by a tube containing a magnet traveling back and forth through a coil of wires. What was the source of power? A bit of kinetic energy created by shaking this “generator.” The flashlight was connected to a series of wires and then finally a computer which would translate the generated electricity into readable numbers.

Procedure:
Once completely connected and with LabView open, we were to shake the flashlight for thirty seconds, while counting the number of shakes per thirty seconds. The next step was to calculate (in Microsoft Excel) the sum of the squares of the voltages from that thirty-second round of shaking. We repeated this 3 times, shaking at different rates, collected the data from Excel and plotted it to fit a linear curve.

Results:
The linear curve plotted by our data seemed a bit drastic. We attributed this to a large difference in the sums of squares of the voltages. Our group hypothesized that this could be due to the difference in “number of shakes per thirty second interval.” Because our number of shakes were often high and varied in range our data was plotted that way. We performed one more round of shaking at a low rate and found our hypothesis to be in line with our results.

Conclusion:
So despite our high range of numbers and semi-drastic linear curve, our results accurately reflected the data and proved Faraday’s Law, which says changing magnetic fluxes, in this case shaking the flashlight containing the magnet, does indeed generate electricity.