Project14 | Winners Announcement: Proving Science: From Experiments to Scientific Apparatuses!

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Congratulations to kmikemoo for Where Did My Volts Go? ! You are the winner of a $200 Shopping Cart and earn the Grand Prize Trophy Badge!

Congratulations to milosrasic98 for The Fast Chain Problem - Arduino Laser Gates, fmilburn for The Planck Constant and the Relationship of Frequency to Photon Energy, and dougw for Electric Hula Hoop ! You are the First Place winners of the $100 Shopping Cart and earn First Place Trophies!

The idea for the Proving Science competition was to build a science apparatus, a measuring device or a project that demonstrates a principle of science. This project competition was a good opportunity to demonstrate solid engineering work through objective experimentation. After all, some of the most paradigm shifting scientific discoveries began with the invention of products made by engineers. The impressive list of famous scientists who were engineers include heroes such as James Clerk Maxwell, Leonardo Di Vinci, Charles Babbage, Hedy Lamar, Michael Faraday, and so many more.

Winning projects included attempts to demonstrate Ohm's Laws, Plank's constant, the Laws of Gravity and a "Mythbusters" project in tribute to the late Grant Imahara who passed away weeks before the project blog was posted. Runners up included a project that experimented with AC Current Sensing, measuring the speed of sound, and Radioactivity fun!

Without further Ado here are your winners.......

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The Winners

Grand Prize:

Where Did My Volts Go? by kmikemoo:

Voltage Drop Bonus Content

Community Member Scoring:

Grand Prize: 2 points, First Place: 3 point Total Points: 5 Points

kmikemoo decided to "prove" Ohms Law through demonstrating voltage drop. When it comes to proving science kmikemoo loves those things that prove Ohm's Law. His personal favorite is line loss or voltage drop. This demonstration grew out of a real world application issue with a poke motor and a job site generator. He gets started with his 1500 watt load bank and utility power. In the video demonstration, watch the voltage on the yellow multimeter to see the voltage difference across test bed as the equivalent conductor size gets smaller and smaller. Some interesting observations are that the circuit current does not change very much at all and the significant change in voltage across the test bed towards the end. It could even be exponential - as in like,.. I², The voltage drop shows that even very small changes in the resistance of your supply lines can have an impact on the power the connected load receives.

Where Did My Volts Go?

First Place Winners:

The Fast Chain Problem - Arduino Laser Gates by milosrasic98:

Community Member Scoring:

Grand Prize: 2 points First Place: 2 Points Total Points: 4 Points

For this project milosrasic98 had to design an apparatus for proving a physical phenomenon which he describes in his blog. This was the project where he fell in love with electronics. A lot of my design, as you will see through his blogs, were influenced by his favorite show, which pushed him into direction of science and electronics, Mythbusters. This project is a tribute to Grant Imahara, who passed a few weeks before this was published, at a very young age. This project was done when he was in high school, after getting the Arduino Starter Kit, as part of an IYPT competition. IYPT is a competition that mixes science with an experimental approach instead of just the usual theory. He was lucky enough to be part of the Serbian team which went to Singapore for the 30th IYPT competition. The problem he had to solve:

A small amount of a ferrofluid placed in an inhomogeneous magnetic field forms hilllike structures. Investigate how the properties of these structures depend on relevant parameters.

The Fast Chain Problem - Arduino Laser Gates

The Planck Constant and the Relationship of Frequency to Photon Energy by fmilburn:

Community Member Scoring:

Grand Prize: 2 points First Place: 2 points Total Points: 4 Points

fmilburn revisits a subject he first explored in 2017 using LEDs to determine the value of the Planck constant. The method used is one that seems to be in wide use among undergraduate physics students these days. In this post it is explored further and this time the light frequency will be measured experimentally as well as the energy of the LEDs in the calculation of the Planck constant. Last time he achieved a result that differed from the accepted value by 11%. Can he do better this time?

The Planck constant is the quantum amount that relates a photon's energy to its frequency and is a fundamental physical constant of quantum mechanics. The origin of the constant was a formulation by Max Planck as a mathematical expression to predict the spectral distribution of thermal radiation from a black body. Albert Einstein formally described the effect of light quanta in a 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect which would eventually win the 1921 Nobel Prize. The relationship of photon energy E, photon frequency f, and the Planck constant, h is known as the Einstein Planck equation and is shown below:

E = hf (1)

This can also be written as E = h c/λ where c is the speed of light and λ is the wavelength.

The Planck Constant and the Relationship of Frequency to Photon Energy

Electric Hula Hoop by dougw:

Community Member Scoring:

Grand Prize: 2 points First Place: 1 points Total Points: 3 Points

How can we make a hula hoop automatically go up a straight vertical pole?

The problem sounds simple, people have been playing with hula hoops for many decades making them go up and down their bodies. However, when it is a straight vertical pole instead of a gyrating human body, a whole new method needs to be developed.

This blog demonstrates a fairly non-intuitive solution to this problem - the resulting machine will make a hula hoop go up a straight vertical pole.

This blog is also probably the only place you will learn about the secret sauce that makes this type of hula hoop work.

This technology uses lots of scientific and engineering principles but there is no physics or engineering textbook that describes how such a device works. The problem must be solved from first principles. The main issue of course is how to impart a vertical force to a free-wheeling hoop to overcome the force of gravity which is always tending to pull the hoop down.

This device uses an electric motor to spin everything, so there is lots of power available, but how can we translate that rotary power into vertical force on a hoop that is not connected to the motor.

You may want to think up your own theories before reading further and you may want to watch it in action in the first video demo to see if the clues there are sufficient to figure out how this particular device works.