Results from Vacuum Chamber Testing

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 panel of glass, as well as the electrical resistance from the cores.
However, one interesting thing that I noticed was that the efficiency of the FES in the vacuum chamber, as well as in the normal environment, decreased as the flywheel reached higher velocities. I am not entirely sure as to why this happens, but my hypothesis is that it takes the same amount of energy to continue speeding up the flywheel to higher velocities, but when the flywheel is spinning faster, the amount of Eddy Currents on the system increases as the magnetic fields are changing more rapidly. Because of this, the input energy remains the same, while the output energy is far less because you are getting the same increase in RPM while getting less energy back out.
After my testing, I realized that something that I should have done while I had the vacuum chamber was to test the air core in the vacuum chamber. Although this may seem like a silly idea, since the air core had such a low efficiency, the reasoning for this is that since the air core is not conductive, the amount of Eddy Currents would be non-existent, or at least significantly lower than the other cores. The problem with the air core is that it took a much longer time to get the flywheel spinning, while the combined resistance of air resistance and friction slowed the flywheel down at a fast pace. However, in the vacuum chamber, the only force that would be slowing down the flywheel would be the small point of contact on the glass, which means that even though the core is regenerating a lot less energy, it has a much longer capture window to regenerate the electricity, which could, and most likely would, greatly increase its efficiency.

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