Okay on this site we want to show you how we got our idea and and what we needed to accomplish it.
Okay, the idea was the first thing which was kind of hard to come up with. Especially for me, Lorenz, since I had no clue what this project was supposed to look like, and I think it needs to be said that German teachers do not think too much about student research projects. At least this is what I guess, since I never had something like this before.
So Matt's first idea was that we would build a box with a speaker on each side. Since sound moves particles and when particles move the temperature rises, we should theoretically be able to measure the change in temperature, and might be also able to see a difference in the measurement when we change the frequency of the radio and so of the waves.
Okay, that we the theoretically thinking, the reality so showed us, that the idea was great, but not possible. Because first of all the temperature changes would be so small, that we were hardly able to measure them. But what was even a bigger problem, was the problem of making sure that we had no influence in our data, caused by temperature changes due to the surroundings, which would be normal heat but also light, which would hit the surface of our test box. At the end the biggest problem was to keep the air in the box and stop the circulation of air with the surroundings. So we figured that this idea would not wok and it was Matt again, who came up with an idea.
Matt's second idea. I do not know where he found that thing but he did. The next day at school he brought something, which looked like a toy boat. The only interesting thing was that it would move without being moved. This was because it had a little engine in it and it just needed to be heated up and then it would move automatically. Matt had also a story to the boat and its engine. He had figured out that the engine was one of the first engines in history. DATE!!! It also one of the older toys and it has a lot of physics in it. I liked the idea and our teacher, Mr. Murray, thought that it might work and gave his okay to it.
Okay, I thought we would now use the boat we already had and would measure its velocity, its efficiency and so on. But this was not Matt's idea, he wanted to built our own boat, and our OWN engines, not only one, but five, with different tubes. As we reached this point I knew, that this project would be pretty serious, and I knew that this project would take a lot of time and it would be hard to get the answer we expected.
Okay, that was our idea, look at hypothesis for more.
1. Construct five boat boilers by clamping the ends of ¾” copper pipe sections with lengths from 5.5cm to 9.5cm in one-centimeter increments.
2. Drill two 1/8” holes one third up the side of each boiler for the exhaust tube outlets.
3. Cut two 23cm sections of the 1/8” copper tubing for the exhaust pipe and solder onto the boiler.
4. Seal the ends of the boiler with the high temperature epoxy overnight.
5. Take each engine, secure it to the boat. Then mark out a selected distance for the boat to travel.
6. Prime the engine by squirting water down one of the exhaust tubes while the engine is upright. This action creates the bubble of air around which the heat source can heat the metal above boiling.
7. Place some sort of guidance on either side of the boat to control direction. In our case two copper pipes were used that rested in the trough of water.
8. Because of the amount of heat required to heat up the engine, the blowtorch is used to heat up the engine until it starts to pulse and then the alcohol is lit. Then the engine is allowed to go from one end of the trough to the other four times, each time recorded.
After the four trials, the exhaust tubes are trimmed 1 centimeter each and the engine is run again. Repeat this process until 5cm have been removed. At this point the data can be graphed to detect trends.