Generator Lab

In this lab, myself and two group members, Gianna and Zhongfan implented Faraday's Law. Faraday's Law states that any change in the magnetic environment of a coil of wire will cause a voltage to be induced in the coil. This change in the magnetic environment was produced by moving a magnet toward and away from coil. Our task was to shake a tube with a magnet which will be traveling inside back and forth through a coil of wires.

To begin, our professor reviewed the generator lab software on Labview which provided us with an understanding of how to measure the voltage output of the generator. Our task was to correlate the number of shakes of the generator, in thirty second intervals, with the sum of the square of the voltages that the generator was creating.

The procedure included shaking our tube at 5 different rates while counting the number of shakes and during the time that our data was being collected by the Labview software. While using Excel, we recorded all of our data and calculated the sum of the squares of the voltages.

Below is the data that our group had collected:

Voltage vs. Number of Shakes
Number of Shakes	Sum of the Squares
67	121.5065
130	303.2793
120	145.7798
132	219.9556

According to our data, as we increased the number of shakes the sum of the squares increased and we had generated a greater voltage. Although, there may have been a counting error for either the 130 number of shakes or the 132 number of shakes because they do not follow the relationship. This could have been due to the fact that in our group, we had taken turns shaking our tube and counting the number of shakes and this was not a consistent way to collect this data.

This experiment provided us with the opportunity to produce our own electricity and understand that the greater the change in the magnetic flux, the greater the currents and voltages will be.

Below I have directly collected data from my most current NStar bill:

As my bill shows, my average daily electric use (at my apartment alone) is 9.5 kWh a total of 278 kWh a month. It looks like that I will not be using a hand held generator to generate electricity for myself!