In this project we focused on making alternate energy cars to travel 5 meters. I selected to work with Jacob Jossart and Kyle Jones for this project. We started the first day with a flier saying that there was an open submission Hyundai was organizing for ideas. The first thing that popped into our mind was to use hydraulics or use a water powered car. We worked on this project of a water car for about two weeks and kept persisting to finish the project and make the car work. Unfortunately, the idea did not work. We tried to many times to tweak the car and we eventually said that it was not working or going together the way we hoped or imagined. With only four days left until the due date, we decided to switch to a spring powered car instead because it is easier to tweak, build, and present for our presentation to the Hyundai executives.
The first thing we did to make the car was make a base. So we used a thin piece of wood and two wood blocks that were the length of the thin piece of wood to attach the wheels to. We used scooter wheels on our project because they fairly small and gripped to the floor. After we attached the wheels we hot glued two small blocks to attach a beam across the two. We used a spring to power our car of course, so we attached that to the beam. The end of that spring had string glued to that. The string was wrapped around the car's axle. The tension of the spring pulls the axle that pulls the string, rotating the axle making the car move.
Reflection In this project, more than anything I developed persistence. After two weeks and kept failing and tweaking the project then move on to a different idea and finish the project in less than four days is very good if I do say so myself. The only thing I think us as a group can work on was cooperating together better and hearing what we have to say before we cut each other off.
Concepts The concepts we had to work with was Kinetic Energy, Potential Energy, and Thermal Energy. The Potential energy was used when the car was wound up and was lying still ready to start but not moving. Kinetic energy is when the car is moving across the five meter distance. Thermal energy is the energy being created when the car is moving across the floor. An example of this would be friction making heat while the car is moving across the floor. To power the car we had a spring, so there was a spring constant. The spring constant is the amount of energy a spring has. For example, when the string was decompressing, it was losing it's spring constant and gaining kinetic energy.