Last class we also did a solar lab with our robots. We were given a light source and a solar pannel, which was hooked up to our robot. We were supposed to hold the solar pannel near the light at different distances to see how much solar energy was produced.
We first held got a base reading on the solar panel without it being near any light. We then proveeded with our experiment and held it 1cm away from the light, 6cm and 25cm. A chart of the data we collected is below.
When there was no light on the solar pannel (0cm) you can see that the energy was negative, obviously solar pannels need light to produce anything.As you can see, the closer the solar pannel was to the light the more energy it produced.
For our next experiment we introduced color. We were given four colored plastic sheets to hold over the light to see how that affected the solar pannel. Our data collected is below.
The chart with all of four colors is not very linear, it’s kind of all over the place. To get a better idea of the effects of the colors I wanted to compate the lightest color and the darkest color we used to see the difference. In the chart to the right I compared light blue with a dark purple. You can see that the light blue color produced more energy than the purple, which makes sense because more light can shine through lighter colors.