Water Wheel Generator: Last day

Today we're working on the final adjustments to the water wheel. We're getting our bolt that connects the wheel to the generator fixed in place, and taking video and pictures of the final product.

Here is our Diagram of Motion:

Example of Forces:

Harwood:

making observations:

We were searching on the internet for ideas for our project, and we found a perpetual motion water wheel. We decided to play with that idea, and see what we could do

defining the problem

In researching how to make the water wheel stay in motion perpetually, we discovered that there really wasn't an easy way to accomplish this. We also wanted our wheel to accomplish a task. So, we scratched the perpetual motion idea, and decided to figure out how to harness the power created from the spinning water wheel.

forming the question

Can we use the power from the water wheel to light a small LED light bulb?

investigating the known

We did a lot of brainstorming about how we would harness the power from the wheel and transfer it to the light bulb. We found a website about how to make a simple generator out of cardboard, magnets, a long nail, and some copper wire.

articulating the expectation

Our hypothesis: We can use the spinning of the water wheel to spin the magnets inside the generator and light the light bulb.

carrying out the study

We built the generator, and the water wheel. Our initial water wheel used dixie cups to catch the water, but we decided that it wasn't the most efficient way to get the wheel spinning, and it wasn't very sturdy either. We changed out the dixie cups for metal L-bars screwed into the bike wheel. We also had an issue getting the wheel to stay connected to the generator. We fixed this by getting two nuts, and super gluing them together, and screwed in the nail from the generator, and the axel of the wheel.

examining the results

So far, we've gotten the generator to work, and the wheel to work, but we haven't yet managed to get the two to work together. (They are apparently super opposed to group work) The axel of the bike wheel stops spinning with the wheel when the wheel gets up to a faster speed. This causes the magnet to stop spinning, so the light bulb won't light.

SUCCESS!!!!!

We got it to work! (for like a second, but it works!) We stuck some super glue into the axel of the bike wheel, to get it to keep spinning the magnets as the wheel spins. So, when the water wheel is spun by hand we can get our LED to light for just about a second. WOOOHOO!

Pictures of the final Wheel Generator: