Miller Elementary Fourth Grade
November 10, 2003
When one motor is used as a generator (or dynamo) to run another motor
some energy is lost to heat and friction.
How efficient are these LEGO motors?
Trying to count how many times the second motor goes around
when the generator is turned exactly 100 times
works in theory
but it is very hard to keep track of the count.
We tried to build a counter. This is like the turn stile in the Motorized simple machine sets.
With 8 to 40 gear ratio twice it is geared 1 to 25 and with the four "gear" at the end it is 1 to 100.
When we had the class count the turns most counted 47 turns to 50 or 94% efficiency.