For this project we had to design and build and using an alternative energy source that was not gas, battery or chemically powered. For our first design we tried to make a gear system to move our car, but the design ended up not working. So we used a rubberband powered car. We had in total about 1 1/2 weeks to finish this project. We used 2 of those days planning and designing the car, and used the rest for building and remodeling.
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Our first car design was hard to accomplish, we tried to use a gear system to power our car. But we soon found out that the gears we made we constantly getting stuck on each other. So we decided to use a rubberband, that was tied around the front axle to move the car. We had to find the potential energy of our rubber band, which we determined to be 6.7J. As you can see all the energy evenutally turned to thermal.
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In the picture at right you can see the different energies that were present when our car got going they were potential, kinetic and thermal energy. As you can see our car was not efficient at all the kinetic energy didn't even hit 15% of energy used. You can see most of the energy is transferred to thermal. The velocity of our car is 0.9m/s. The acceration was .06 m/s as the car was still accerating.
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In our project we used many different equations to help us figure out our calculations. The equations include:
V=D/t which is used to find the velocity of our car, velocity is how fast the car is moving in one direction
a=v/t This is the rate of change of velocity speeding up or down.
K=F/d is the spring constant which measures how difficult it is to expand or compress. Our spring constant is 6.9N/m.
PE=1/2 K/x² This is spring potential energy which shows how much energy is stored up in the rubber band
KE=1/2 mv² Kinetic energy is used to find energy due to motion.
We also use many different term to use in our answer. They will include:
Meters with will be shown as m
Joules which is shown as J
Newtons which is shown as N and
meters per second which is shown as m/s
V=D/t which is used to find the velocity of our car, velocity is how fast the car is moving in one direction
a=v/t This is the rate of change of velocity speeding up or down.
K=F/d is the spring constant which measures how difficult it is to expand or compress. Our spring constant is 6.9N/m.
PE=1/2 K/x² This is spring potential energy which shows how much energy is stored up in the rubber band
KE=1/2 mv² Kinetic energy is used to find energy due to motion.
We also use many different term to use in our answer. They will include:
Meters with will be shown as m
Joules which is shown as J
Newtons which is shown as N and
meters per second which is shown as m/s
This projected ended up not working, my group didnt really work together as one. So things I need to work on next time are, trying to help me group be more orgainized and work together. I can acomplish this by making a list of what we need to do and when we are doing it, to help everyone know what were doing. Things that I did well were, taking things into my hands when people didnt know hot to do it, and show them how it worked. We all were pretty good at coming up with ideas to help make the project work. Over all I think our project needed a little more tweeking to help it..