Alternative Energy Vehicle
In order to enhance their position in in engineering, Hyundai announced a proposal for engineers to submit alternative energy driven cars. We, as very driven, young engineers, have decided to create one. Our car was driven by a spring loaded mouse trap and therefore called, The Mickey Mouse Trap Car. Our car is efficient and affordable while still releasing no pollutant emissions because it's run by a completely mechanical maneuver.
Concepts
In the graph above, on the left, the growth and decay of all energy is displayed. While the total energy is constant, all other energies fluctuate, especially kinetic and potential. In order to find these energies we find the velocity of our car at each meter. We then used the equations (PE=1/2kx^2) and (KE=1/2mv^2) for each velocity to get the energies and graph them. The main points of our graph is that it had an original PE and total energy of 5.01J and had 4.96% energy converted into KE, which had a maximum of 0.25J. The potential energy came from the spring being loaded, which was the transferred into connected energy as the spring was released. However a lot of the potential energy in our car went into thermal energy due to the high friction in our model. The second graph exhibits time compared the the distance covered and time compared to velocity reached. The main points are that it took 8.03 seconds for the car to travel 5m and and it reached a top velocity of 0.943m/s.
Reflection - Fire Away/Alternative Energy Vehicle
Fire Away was just an introduction to friction, distance, and other concepts included in making our vehicles. However, because it wasn't a full project, we had the same groups for both projects. In the Fire Away project our only task was to move a projectile in general. There was no required distance or speed, it just had to launch something and make it go somewhere. Even though it wasn't necessary, we took it upon ourselves of course, as teenagers, to try to launch ours the farthest. In all of my projects thus far, I have experienced the same situation of planning everything, finishing very early, but then testing it and failing, then having to tweak and finesse the project for days, and this project was no exception. Our machine went about 30m to begin with, but that wasn't nearly enough for our liking, so we took it apart and reposition the rubber bands and the axle. However, to our dismay, this made our machine fall even shorter than before launching balls at an average of 23m. We then were left with about two days to somehow fix this issue. This put great stress on us and caused a few arguments amongst my group and I. My group members and I were good friends outside of class, but in class we didn't work so well together. One group member specifically liked to do just about everything, which I also enjoy doing, so that was one main source of our disagreements. We also tending to prefer our own ideas opposed to each others so we never agreed, we just did one idea at a time to see who's was better. Despite our disputes we moved the axle again and succeeded in enhancing our machines performance, so then it launched balls at an average of 40m. However, the alternative vehicle car was a little better. We knew from the beginning tat we didn't want a repeat of last project so we found a car to replicate from the internet. Sadly, one of my group members and I were going to be absent on the first day of building, leaving just one our group members to build all alone. However, on the bright side we had a great blue print so she created the whole body of the car in one day. But when my other partner and I were able to help build and we finished the car, it didn't work. To sum up the experience it was very frustrating because we had a lot of time, in the beginning anyway, but we couldn't identify our problem, let alone a solution. Of course we did finish eventually, but I'm beginning to realize that whenever I do a project I tend to rush through the building process just to say I've completed it. I need to slow down on construction in general so I'll have less problems in the end because it's easier to fix something while building it rather than take apart an already finished, but nonfunctional project.