M. Schlauch's Blog about Some Things

I was very happy with how my project turned out. I have a much better grasp on the confusing topics that surrounded my science fair, most of which include college-level electrical engineering, and I feel a lot more confident in my design than I used to. I would not have changed anything about my project, as I think it turned out very well. I plan on using the research that I got from this project to help me in my science fair for next year, as I try to combat the issues that still linger in my design. I have grown a lot during my sophomore year, both socially and academically. Socially, I have become a lot more open with people, both friends and family. Academically, I have greatly improved my grades since last year and have worked very hard on trying to break my old habits of not studying or putting all of my effort into the work that I do. Something that I learned about life was that no matter what you do, life is going to throw something bad your way, and you have to make a choice...

I wrote the script for my speech throughout this week and began filming for my TEDTalk today. I started my recording with a dramatic opening about the environmental crisis leftover from the industrial expansion of humans, which transitions into the reasoning for my project, which is to make my Flywheel Energy Storage device more efficient to combat the battery in a desperate attempt to save the world that we live in. The majority of my speech is explanations, since my project has a lot of depth into college-level electrical engineering, and so a very time consuming part of writing it was to make sure the language I used was not overly complicated for a non-scientific individual would understand. I also go into a brief but informative description of my results about the different core designs, as well as how I created and improved on my design. This will also be including the designs that I have planned for the future on how I plan to make the zero-gravity to work, as I would like to us...

I could not get my zero-gravity mechanism to work, since there was a design flaw in my original design that prevented my new mechanism to work. On my old design, the flywheel actually rotates further down that what I anticipated due to the heavy weight attached to the flywheel, and so this extra weight was not accounted for when I was creating my design. My new structures ended up being too far away from the flywheel to make the magnetic fields come in contact with the magnetic fields of the flywheel. However, with this new knowledge, I did come up with an idea of how, in the future (with stronger, industrial magnets and stronger 3D printing material), I could get the design to work, with a structure that surrounds the flywheel rather than only having a set of magnets on the top and bottom. The reason I mentioned the 3D printing material is that one of my structures actually broke while I was assembling the magnets into it, and I had to use glue to repair the design so I could test it....

The formula that I am using is: Energy of the Flywheel= 1/2*Moment of Inertia*angular velocity^2 To find the moment of inertia, I need to use the formula kmr^2 (inertial constant* mass of flywheel* radius squared), which is the moment of inertia for a rotating disk. The inertial constant of a flat solid disk is about .606 . The mass of the flywheel is about 2.5lbs, which converts to about 1.13kg . The radius of the disk is 2.5 inches, which converts to about .064m . Putting this back into the moment of inertia formula, we find that the moment of inertia for my flywheel is about .0028 . To find the angular velocity, I need to convert the RPM, or Revolutions Per Minute, into radians per second, the basic unit for angular velocity. The rough conversion from RPM to radians/sec is about 1 rad/s is equal to 9.55 RPM, which means that 6000 RPM, the max RPM I was able to get my flywheel up to in the vacuum chamber, is equal to about 628.3 rad/s. Plugging this back i...

I began to create the 3D models for my design. I have not fully created the design for how I will get the flywheel to spin in zero-gravity, but I have some ideas. The reason I want to get my flywheel to spin in zero-gravity is because I would hopefully like to figure out a way to get a flywheel onto the International Space Station, which uses rechargeable nickel-hydrogen batteries right now to store its excess solar energy. The benefits of using a flywheel in space is that there would be no need for a vacuum chamber to reduce the air resistance of the system (since space is a vacuum already), which would cut down on the input energy into the system. Furthermore, even though the batteries on the ISS are rechargeable, they are misleading, since they can only recharge for a certain amount of time until the battery is completely dead, which would call for a replacement. This could require an entire rocket dedicated to bringing up a replacement battery that would require a lot of resour...

I was able to acquire a vacuum chamber from my father's work, which was amazing since I was worried that I would have to reach out to multiple companies to see which of them would like to help out a child's science fair project. However, in order to use the vacuum chamber for the least amount of time, I decided to only test the most efficient core in the vacuum chamber, the ferrite core. After my testing in a normal environment, I concluded that there was little to no variation in the efficiency of the core over multiple trials. That is why, in my vacuum chamber testing, I decided to test the core at different velocities to see if there was a correlation between RPM and efficiency. Just looking at efficiency, the vacuum chamber made the ferrite core approximately 7 times more efficient than it had been in a normal environment. This was incredible but also somewhat predicted, since cutting out air resistance to slow down the FES leaves only the small point of contact on...

The book finished on a rather disappointing but reasonable ending, as Bryson and Katz never actually complete the Appalachian Trail. However, this makes sense because they embark on the journey in their late 40s, where some fit people in their early 20s do not get close to completing the trail. However, they made it a lot further than they were expected to, hiking 800 of the 2000 miles that the Trail encompasses. This was very inspiring, as this book teaches one of the most important lessons: never let your condition in life affect what you do. The odds were always against Bryson and Katz, as two older men that looked like they never hiked before in their life. However, this didn't stop the two, and together, through many different trials, they were able to conquer far more than what was expected of them. All in all, this book was amazing, and really taught me a lot of lessons as well as giving me a lot of knowledge on many different topics, most notably on the history of national...