Solar Car: Our company is Batmobile Inc. We have created the Solarmobile. It is a solar car that can go five meters. It transports 250 grams of pennies. Our car has a mass of 750 grams with the pennies. Our car is free to use because it runs of the sun. Our car does not pollute the environment. This car's solar panel can move so it collects the maximum amount of energy.
Trebuchet: Our trebuchet had a base and two legs. The legs held up an axle that had a large arm to fire the projectile. Our projectile traveled 33 meters.
Solar Car Content:
Distance vs. Time: The graph on the top right shows the distance vs. time on our car. The y axis shows the distance in meters and the x axis is the time in seconds. Our car's distance vs. time had a slope of 1/4 which is also the velocity.
Velocity: Velocity is represented by the slopes of the distance vs. time graph. Our solar car maintained a velocity of 0.25 m/s but at 15 seconds it was 0.26 m/s. Potential Energy: We found our PE by finding that 1120 Watts of sunlight hit the surface of the earth per square meter. We used the area of our panels to find how much sunlight was hitting our panels. This was our PE. Each solar panel had an area of 36 square centimeters. Kinetic Energy: Our kinetic energy stayed the same. The mass and velocity stayed the same so our kinetic energy was 0.0234 J. At 15 seconds it was 0.0254 J because of the slight increase in Velocity. Thermal Energy: The thermal energy started at zero and it maxed at 65.984 J. Thermal energy is the TotalE-KE+PE so the thermal energy rises. The KE and PE stay the same while the TotalE increases. Friction: We used friction to make our vehicle move and stop. The friction between the wheels and the ground allowed it to move and the friction of the string on the axle stopped our car. We also used friction to keep our panels in place so we could maximize our collected energy. |
Trebuchet Content:
Reflection: |
PEspring: Our trebuchet used spring potenial energy. PEspring is the energy that is stored by stretching or compressing an elastic object. We found it by multiplying half the spring constant by the distance the spring was stretched squared (1/2kx^2). The spring constant was 196 N/m so our PEspring was 14.15 J.
Velocity: The trebuchet's projectile had a velocity of 13.85 m/s. This was found by using the equations for vertical and horizontal velocity. I then set up a triangle and solved for the hypotenuse. KEball: We found the KE of the ball by using KE=1/2mv2. We used our mass and velocity to find that the ball had a KE of 2.16 J. Percent of energy converted: The converted energy was found by dividing the kinetic energy by the potential energy. This showed us the amount of potential energy that turned into kinetic energy. |
On these projects our group did very good. We did a good job of planning our project before we started. For example: on both the projects we designed a prototype in Tinkercad. We then used that design to build our machine. It worked well for the trebuchet. The solar car was more difficult and we ended up changing our design a lot. We also used our building time efficiently. We were able to create two working machines with the maker space build time. We just had to make a few small changes in the classroom.
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There are a few things that we needed to improve on. Our group needed to give out equal tasks. We were working most of the time but sometimes we would just sit around. We needed to improve on all working on the project at the same time. We also need to improve on allowing more time to work on the presentation. We wasted time when we should have been practicing our presentation. Overall our group did a pretty good job on these projects.
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