October 1st, 2012.

The experiment that we worked on monday was about how energy is produced by using a tube that had a magnet and by shaking  the tube the magnet would travel back and forth through a coil of wires generating energy. The goal of our experiment was to correlate the number of shakes of the generator using a thirty second time interval along with the sum of the squares of the voltages in order to see how the number of shakes related to the amount of energy generated. In other words, to see how by shaking the generator faster within that time interval, more energy would be generated than applying less shakes.

We used 5 attempts in order to provide the information to a scatter plot on excel so we would appreciate much more easily the fluctuations of the voltages given certain rates of shaking.

To get started, we plugged the wires from the generator to the robotic computer and this one would process the voltages to report them in the generator lab. on the main PC. my classmate and I had some difficulties at the beginning with the computer connection but we solved the problem to perform our task.

We did not use an increasing rate (shaking it faster each time), instead we did random rates of shaking so that our scatter plot would fluctuate on a six-sag form. This is what we obtained after doing the five attempts and calculating the sum of the squares of the voltages that were reported in the Generator Lab.

On this chart we have the number of shakes on our X axis, and the voltage on the Y axis. The blue dots represent each five attempts of shaking within a 30 second window. We first did 0 shakes, then we did about 95 of them and resulted in the highest ammount of voltage. Now, you may think that something is wrong with the chart, because the other 3 attempts generated such little voltage with much more shakes. What we believe happened is that since we shook the generator so fast, we did not do it in an horizontal proper way so the magnet did not have sufficient contact with each end of the generator. When we did it 95 times, it was in a consistent back and forth motion, thus, generating more voltage.

That concluded our experiment for that day.