Engineering Redesign
Project Description
For this project, we were tasked to pick one of the projects we had previously done this year and basically do it better than we had previously. For this project, my group chose to redo the hybrid car project. You can see my previous project here. For our new car, our idea was to use water electrolysis to obtain hydrogen, which we would then capture and ignite, to propel our car forward. The electrolysis worked, but it didn't produce the amounts of hydrogen that we wanted. We then tried using a chemical reaction between hydrochloric acid and zinc to create zinc chloride and hydrogen. We had to calculate the amount of zinc and hydrochloric acid needed to create enough hydrogen to fill the pipe, and so we wouldn't have extra dangerous gasses. We were able to create the hydrogen we needed, but then we ran into the problem of getting the explosion that we wanted. We hypothesized that the hydrogen that was in the pipe didn't have enough oxygen to make the the explosion we wanted, because when we tried just hydrogen in a balloon, we got a pretty decent explosion. Our solution to these problems was to blow up a long and skinny balloon part way manually, then fill the rest with hydrogen from the reaction. This worked a lot better, and gave us the explosion we wanted. Unfortunately we ran out of time, so we were unable to create the car powered by a hydrogen explosion. Even if we were able to create a car and attach the hydrogen balloon in the pipe to it, we don't think there would be enough force to actually propel the car forward. We noticed this when we blew up the hydrogen balloon in the pipe, and noticed how little the pipe jumped. This led us to believe that it wouldn't have been enough force to propel a car. You can see our presentation and the with the videos of the different experiments below.
For this project, we were tasked to pick one of the projects we had previously done this year and basically do it better than we had previously. For this project, my group chose to redo the hybrid car project. You can see my previous project here. For our new car, our idea was to use water electrolysis to obtain hydrogen, which we would then capture and ignite, to propel our car forward. The electrolysis worked, but it didn't produce the amounts of hydrogen that we wanted. We then tried using a chemical reaction between hydrochloric acid and zinc to create zinc chloride and hydrogen. We had to calculate the amount of zinc and hydrochloric acid needed to create enough hydrogen to fill the pipe, and so we wouldn't have extra dangerous gasses. We were able to create the hydrogen we needed, but then we ran into the problem of getting the explosion that we wanted. We hypothesized that the hydrogen that was in the pipe didn't have enough oxygen to make the the explosion we wanted, because when we tried just hydrogen in a balloon, we got a pretty decent explosion. Our solution to these problems was to blow up a long and skinny balloon part way manually, then fill the rest with hydrogen from the reaction. This worked a lot better, and gave us the explosion we wanted. Unfortunately we ran out of time, so we were unable to create the car powered by a hydrogen explosion. Even if we were able to create a car and attach the hydrogen balloon in the pipe to it, we don't think there would be enough force to actually propel the car forward. We noticed this when we blew up the hydrogen balloon in the pipe, and noticed how little the pipe jumped. This led us to believe that it wouldn't have been enough force to propel a car. You can see our presentation and the with the videos of the different experiments below.
Physics of Explosions |
Terms and Definitions
Electrolysis: Breaking down a substance by running an electrical current through it. We used this to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Balanced Chemical Equation: An equation where the number of atoms on the reactants side is equal to the number of atoms on the product side. We used this to find out what the products of hydrochloric acid and zinc would be. Example: 2H2 + O2 ---> 2H2O
Electrolysis: Breaking down a substance by running an electrical current through it. We used this to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Balanced Chemical Equation: An equation where the number of atoms on the reactants side is equal to the number of atoms on the product side. We used this to find out what the products of hydrochloric acid and zinc would be. Example: 2H2 + O2 ---> 2H2O
Reflection
I thought this was the most fun of all the projects we had done all year. I really enjoyed working with my group, and learned a lot throughout this whole project. Although we didn't end up with the result we wanted, I though the process of getting the amount of hydrogen we needed was a great experience. I thought this group worked really well together. One negative of this project was that we weren't always the safest when doing our experiments. This is definitely something I plan to work on and fix. Another problem was that we took a lot of qualitative data, and this especially was a project that we needed to take quantitative data. I think in the future I will do a much better job at attaching numbers to observations. Overall, I thought this project went really well, and even though we didn't get a functioning car, was a huge success.
I thought this was the most fun of all the projects we had done all year. I really enjoyed working with my group, and learned a lot throughout this whole project. Although we didn't end up with the result we wanted, I though the process of getting the amount of hydrogen we needed was a great experience. I thought this group worked really well together. One negative of this project was that we weren't always the safest when doing our experiments. This is definitely something I plan to work on and fix. Another problem was that we took a lot of qualitative data, and this especially was a project that we needed to take quantitative data. I think in the future I will do a much better job at attaching numbers to observations. Overall, I thought this project went really well, and even though we didn't get a functioning car, was a huge success.