Alternate Enery
This Project is the longest by far and is designed to teach us about heat lights and solar activity. We did nine miny projects: learning about atomic structure, state and heat, designing a hot water heater, learning about solar angles and how they changes during the seasons, building a model home, selecting a site, testing materials, designing a cold frame, designing something to make the north window in the solar studio better, learning why we would want to use solar, and learning how to generate electricity with the wind turbine. The main project was building the cold frame and north window designs.
Atomic Structure State and Heat
As everyone should know there are 3 (technically 4, but we didn't cover plasma) states of matter, solid, liquid , and gas. Solids have the lest amount of molecular movement more commonly know as heat. They are locked into a rigid formation and holds it shape, for the most part. The next stage up is liquid, liquid still are bonded with the molecules around them, but not tightly and are allowed to roll around, letting that substance flow. this stage has a medium amount of molecular movement, more that a solid, less than a gas. Gases are all over the place. They don't hold bonds to other molecules and bounce around filling whatever space there allowed to. They have very very high molecular energy.
Solar Water Heater
In this section we learned about how heat travels, through radiation, convection, and conduction.
When heat has to travel through a solid, it simply tries to flow through it. Sometimes this works quite well, for instance flowing through copper. When a material, like copper, allows heat to flow trough it with retaliative ease it is called a conductor. However, not everything is a conductor, something like rubber resits the flow of heat through it, a lot. These materials are called insulators. The black element and tinfoil at the bottom of our heater takes the heat from the sun and it flows through it to the water.
When heat has to travel through a solid, it simply tries to flow through it. Sometimes this works quite well, for instance flowing through copper. When a material, like copper, allows heat to flow trough it with retaliative ease it is called a conductor. However, not everything is a conductor, something like rubber resits the flow of heat through it, a lot. These materials are called insulators. The black element and tinfoil at the bottom of our heater takes the heat from the sun and it flows through it to the water.
Convention happens when heat has to travel through some sort of fluid (not just liquids are fluids anything that flows ie. air, water vapor, liquid iron, magma, etc...). The liquid swirles around. When heat is added to the liquid it moves around more, so it becomes less dense and rises, but as it moves away from the heat it cools falling back down to the bottom were it is re heated and then the whole process starts over again. This is how we often times cook food by putting it into the water.
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Ration is the final form of heat transfer. When it has nothing to flow through it just flies out in waves hitting whatever in in its path. This is how we get heat from the sun though over 90 million miles of vacuum. The tinfoil panels reflected the suns radiation into the middle. Solar Radiation is what gave the water its heat.
Passive Solar Home Modle
The point of this project was to learn the different types of techniques of using sunlight to light a house. This includes skylights, windows, clear story windows, light shelves, and solar tubes.
- Skylights: These are are simply cuts in the ceiling they provide large amounts of direct sunlight. They do not have a high flux variance (diffing amounts of light during the different parts of the day) if the face the right direction. We used them in the living room, master room and the hall.
- Windows: windows are essential they provide light as well as make a house usable and livable. They let in large amounts of light and depending on what direction the window faces will determine how concentrated the light is and the flux variance. we used windows in every room but the hall and bathroom.
- Clear story windows are high windows, and are used, not to take in the view, but light. and lots of it. We used them in every major room in the house. Just like windows the flux variance and concentration depends on the placement.
- Light Shelves are used to defuse light especially used with clerestory windows. They of course depend on the window there used with for the flux levels, but produce a defused light by bouncing it off the ceiling. We used them with our clerestory windows.
- Solar tubes are awesome. They are an amazing way yo effectively light a house with the sun. They work by capturing sunlight with a dome and reflecting it down a tube then through a diffuser. We tried to use them extensively in our model but it was hard to make them work accurately. They have a low luminous flux and are very dispersed.
Materials Testing Lab
This was a Lab to reinforce the engineering designee cycle, and to figure out what materials would work well for our cold frames. We tested various materials for insulating, conducting, reflecting, absorbing, and holding heat.
We tested:
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This project we reviewed the engineering and desine cycle. We used this to create a lab to test there materials, but failed. The data was too statistically insignificant due to the meager heat source, so we essentially fount the results we wanted online.
North window Plan
For our north window plan, we decided to go dirt simple. We put in curtains. These curtains blocked direct sunlight coming in from southerly facing clerestory windows and reflected them back into the house. We had two sides on the inside and we had a silvery fabric to reflect more like back and the house, on the other side we have black fabric to absorb heat coming from the outside and to insulate the window. In this project we learned about solar angles. Other groups learned a lot more about this than us because they had to reflect light however we still picked up on it. We learned that the sun comes in during the winter at a 28° Angle. We also learned about insulation and how aerier materials, are typically better insulators. We use the knowledge of the sun angles to properly place the curtain, and know the curtain is needed. We use the insulation to select a decent fabric.
Cold Frame
We put a lot of work into our cold frame. We use specialized materials. And put a lot of thought into it. We again used knowledge of sun angles, especially in deciding about where, and if we should use the bottom window. We used a lot of what was learned about insulators reflectors and so on in the materials lab to decide what to use to build a cold frame out of. One materials tested in the lab was reflextex. It performed very well and was also reflective so we decided it would be a great insulator and reflector for the inside of our cold frame.
These two products were grouped together which proved to be a bit of a problem. We spent a lot more time on the cold frame and kind of neglected to the north window. If they would have been separated the two products would have been a lot more balanced. However it made any good that that one was really good. If time was spent on both of them equally we would've had two mediocre projects, nothing that would've been picked by either panel.
Wind Turbine
This mini project Was designed to teach us about the functionality of Bernoulli is principle. And how to generate electricity without the use of fossil fuels. Bernoulli use principle is where when fluid moves faster less pressure is exerting by it. Most industrial wind turbines used as to make the blades been using a similar shape to an airplane wing. I tried to make a winter I'm just like an industrial one; it works but not great. Mostly because it was too heavy. One of the wind turbines that work to the best were this simple light weight ones. I think this is because we were on such a small scale that you could get away with semi faulty principles. However you could not add too much weight. If if I had a chance to review this project I would spend more time on a simpler design.
Reflection
This project was fun, but long. My group didn't work so well together in the beginning. I did the lion's share of the work. Many of the other members in my group did little or no work. However, after the first collaborative check in, our group worked a lot better. One thing no one really well is the products we produced. We could also, when we put our minds to it, get a lot done. However, that was rare. Most of time one or two people were either absent, distracted, or just not working. Next time I think I will work harder to get the rest of my group to take on more leadership roles, and get more work done. I will also try to make it so that our group works more as the team and less as individuals. I learned that I tend to wander off and do my own thing frequently. And it was reinforced to me that I need to let other people take more leadership roles and do more work.