Introduction
For this project we built an alternative energy car. The primary limitation of this project was you were not aloud to use chemical energy to power your car this forced you to use things other than batteries and combustion engines to power your vehicle which still aloud for a lot of creativity to the project. Do to the way the project was set up you had 2 main ways to power your car the first is gravitational energy or powering your car through dropping things. The other options is powering your car is through rubber bands which was the primary way to power your car.
time line
The first step was to decide how we would power our car which we decided to use rubber bands in a day as well as research different ideas.
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we built our project for the day.
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we finish the build that day.
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presentation day
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After we figured out how we would power the machine we planned what to build for a day.
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started working on the presentation and tweaking car so it can reach 5 meters for the day
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continued tweaking the car and working on the presentation
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presentation
concepts
Spring Constant- Spring constant is the measure of how elastic a spring is and is measured by putting a known force against the spring and seeing how much it dropped you can then use this to calculate the amount of force required to move the spring a set distance. This amount can be checked by applying another force on to the spring and checking if you go the same ratio.
Spring Potential Energy- This is the stored energy in a coiled spring or stretched rubber band. This potential energy was the most commonly used way to store energy and is calculated with 1/2 the spring constant * the distance moved by the spring times squared. This is seen easily in our project as our car was powered by rubber bands to create kinetic energy.
Kinetic Energy- Kinetic energy is the energy due to movement and is calculated with the equation 1/2 mass*velocity. It is converted from the potential energy in our rubber bands to create movement in our car. Kinetic energy is also often used to scale efficiency as potential energy is converted to kinetic energy the amount exchanged compared to the original amount is the efficiency.
Thermal Energy- Thermal energy is the energy released through heat and is often considered a waste product in things like engines and cars. This energy is primarily caused by friction in our project which is why many groups created designs to minimize all frictions.
Friction- Friction is the conversion of energy as kinetic energy is lost while bumping into things and gets converted to thermal energy primarily. Friction is very important in creating energy efficient engines as you need to reduce friction to get more kinetic energy out of cars. It also is important to produce motion as you need friction on the wheels to propel it forward.
Velocity-Velocity is the rate of distance covered in a direction. Its unit is meters per second and can be seen well in most our inclined planes. Velocity is basically how fast something is going in one direction due to it being a vector. Velocity is calculated by distance divided by time. This is how fast the car reach each distance.
Acceleration-Acceleration is the rate of a change of velocity. It is often talked about in things like cars as how quickly it gets to a certain speed. Acceleration is calculated by dividing the velocity by time and unit is meters per seconds squared. This is how fast our car speeds up to reach its maximum speed and slow down.
Reflection
I feel this project was the best done by my group and my self this year as we solved the problems quickly and creatively while still looking at different ways to solve problems without excluding group members from helping in this project. Due to this great team work and and co operation I learned how much a team can help in solving group problems by pitching in ideas. This was seen well when we were optimizing our car so it could reach 5 meters consistently. This involved the whole team as we looked at all the different things that need to be changed so that it could reach the destination this included things like gluing the wheals on to our vehicle and changing how many rubber bands we should use and how we configure them. I also learned pitch ideas better to my teammates. For example my team was trying to think of sales pitches for our car so explained clearly how our car was quick to build and easy to make and they understood what I was talking about and why it was important. I feel I could have improved a bit on my leadership as this project I lowest team score on leader ship that i'v gotten this year so I feel I should have thought of more ideas to give to the group and help manage the group to being more on task. I am also annoyed at my lack of creative naming in this project as I feel I could have came up with something which was outside of an inside joke with our group. Over all however I feel my group did excellently aside from a few nit picks from myself.