The aim of our senior project is to construct an energy-generating bicycle that will be able to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy. Our hope is that the bike will be able to charge devices, such as mobile phones, and thus provide a way for us to reduce our carbon footprints. As HKIS is becoming a greener campus by the year, we thought that it would be most appropriate to take on this project on behalf of the school.
All three of us were interested in doing this project because we are passionate about the environment, and hope to help improve the environmental situation in some way. We are all planning to study environmental engineering in college, a burgeoning field that uses technology to tackle the environmental issues of today, such as pollution and global warming.
This project thus has two aspects to it - an environmental, service-based aspect as well as a technological, science-based aspect. The SLR of “Self Motivated Learning” is the focus of our project. By challenging ourselves with subject matter that is not covered in neither Honors Physics nor AP Physics, we are pushing ourselves to explore science, specifically physics, at a much higher level. None of us, for example, knew what a generator or a diode was when we first began planning for this project. As we gradually learn how the parts go together, and why each part is needed, however, we will learn an immense amount about the practical applications of physics.
The SLR of “Contributing to Society”, on the other hand, will be achieved once we have completed the project. We hope to leave the energy-generating bike at school as something that students can use to make a little improvement in their carbon footprint. By enabling students to charge their phones or other small devices through their own physical movements, we hope to inspire students to consider the environmental impact of their energy usage and to become more aware of energy initiatives. Furthermore, it is our hope that, if and when we succeed in building the bike, we will show other students the practical applications of science and motivate them to explore the different possibilities that science has to offer.
Many of the concepts and skills that we based our project on was gathered from different websites, youtube videos and advice from retired engineers. However, every source that we got information from would give us different advice and at the end we had to base our information from one main source to create our plan which is from www.pedalpowergenerator.com/#schematic
Some of the strengths of how we went on with the project included the fact that we are all passionate and determined to do our best on our project. Even though some of the engineering skills and knowledge was extremely hard to grasp but because we were determined to learn and finish our project, we were able to spend lots of time to make sure we that the project would turn out alright. One of the weakness that we had was that we waited too long to start building the bike. We had started planning all the parts and materials that were needed in February but only got all the parts in May which left us with less than one month to construct the bike hence which is why we’re not sure if we will finish the project on time or not.
