Hybrid Car Design
About Our Project:
In this project I worked with Garrett Hoefer and Tim Madison. Our assignment was to design and build a car that uses some form of energy other than gasoline. For our project we decided on a battery powered vehicle. we used the programmable "Brick" from a Lego Mindstrom kit.
The Results:
For our velocity vs. time graph. It was expected to have the velocity increase and then decrease in a parabolic arc over time. In reality, our graph was not so. Here is the graph:
As you can see, the results were not as expected. This is due to many factors.
Such as:
* Friction in the form of sound and heat
*Experimental/ human error
In our case, friction was a very large issue. Our wheels rubbed along the blocks of wood holding the axles in place. This caused thermal friction. Also, the motors internally had significant amounts of audible friction because it was a large challenge to muffle the sound. If we were able to fix one thing about our project, I would have found a better solution to muffling the sound.
Such as:
* Friction in the form of sound and heat
*Experimental/ human error
In our case, friction was a very large issue. Our wheels rubbed along the blocks of wood holding the axles in place. This caused thermal friction. Also, the motors internally had significant amounts of audible friction because it was a large challenge to muffle the sound. If we were able to fix one thing about our project, I would have found a better solution to muffling the sound.
In the distance over time graph, the results went just as expected. We estimated that the distance would go up equally for every second. For every meter travelled, it took approx. 3.7 seconds. For a total time of 19.48 seconds. The graph is shown here:
Conclusion:
Over all, I felt that the project went very well. I loved working with my group and I felt that we were very productive. However, I would have changed a few of the things we did. I as had said before, I would change that way we muffled the sound. we should have been more through and thought out that process instead of leaving it last minute. I also would have changed our organization. Some of our data was lost during the project. We should have been more professional and recorded that data in one place instead of many different places. Some of the things I thought we did really well on were communication and collaboration. My group was very good at deciding how we wanted the car to run and how we wanted it to look. We were also very good at choosing who would do what work.