Phys/Envst 104 final projects

Take a look at some of the amazing projects by the phenomenal students in Phys/Envst 104 this semester. Phys/Envst 104 (Renewable Energy) is a general education science course I teach at Mount Holyoke College.

Can I get a plate of solar energy sunny-side up please?

The air is stiflingly hot. You realize you can hardly breathe. Your skin feels like it is catching fire. Your alarm wakes you up.

It is often said that music is an escape from the reality people live in. Listeners can drift off into whatever Nirvana or fantasy they would like. Allowing the melodies and lyrics to ebb into their thoughts and
produce feelings they were not otherwise feeling. But what if music started to reflect people’s reality.

The lyrics and melody becomes a part of the listener so if the lyrics were to inspire change, there would be more initiative towards improving the state of our environment.

Where does your electricity come from?

The 6:30 alarm goes off, and you roll out of bed. In that groggy, barely awake moment, what is the first thing you do? You flip on the lightswitch. This is a simple action that occurs every morning and throughout the day, but hardly ever does the average person give a second thought to what energy source is supplying power to that lightbulb or where that power is coming from.

Our project strives to highlight the differences in overall efficiencies of coal power plants and renewable energy sources, including the long term monetary benefits of switching to renewable sources.

Lithium mining: the World’s future

With current technology, electric cars rely on lithium batteries. Because lithium batteries are the foundation of the future, it is essential to understand the process of lithium mining and its possible impacts. The purpose of this project is to provide information about the mining process itself, but also to raise concerns and explore political, environmental and economic impacts so that further improvements can be made if necessary.

Take a bite out of climate change

Take the survey

With the climate crisis looming over our heads, it’s easy to quickly point blame at the industrial giants and overlook our own contributions. How much do our seemingly simple day to day actions, down to what we put on our plates, have an impact on our climate? The power to create and ensure a sustainable future comes from a rather unsuspecting place: your plate. The agricultural and food industries are big players in the topic of climate crisis, and what we decide to consume can either drastically help or hurt that.

Responses:

Going going gone: the tragic tale of four truly important endangered species

Download a pdf of the flyers

Pigeons scuttling across city sidewalks in the winter wind. Bees and butterflies slowly reviving spring flowers. Crickets singing in the grass on warm summer nights. Squirrels hoarding acorns in the fall. What if one day none of that happened? You’d realize something was wrong, but how late would you be? We, as humans, focus almost entirely on ourselves: how much longer will we have the resources we need? How many more people can the world support? How can we produce, transport, and store enough food? How can we make sure we survive, regardless of the cost?

Not all burgers are created equal

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Per capita meat consumption has more than doubled in the past half-century. Linked with global population growth, the overall demand for meat has increased five-fold. The meat industry has put a heavy demand on resources, limiting the availability of water, land, feed, fertilizer, and fuel. American fast food chains have thrived on the novelty of a classic burger. Long lines at the drive- thru highlight consumerism at its finest. However, does each consumer ever think of the environmental footprint that goes into creating that one burger patty?

How accessible is solar?

The US experiences the 4th greatest wealth inequality compared to 141 other countries. 578,424 people were reported to live without housing in 2014, and 46.7 million are living in poverty. That’s more that 14% of our population. We have all been told that solar power is going to save us. Solar power can produce upwards of 147kWh/day/person and in an ideal world; solar power would be as commonly used as gas and coal. We decided to break down the financials of installing and using solar power, in order to provide more insight as to whether it's a viable alternative as we combat climate change.

Catching kid’s attention to advocate for change

Download a pdf of the flyer
Download a pdf of the workshop flyer

In our curriculum we want to incorporate the knowledge on the four renewable resources and how important it is to replace fossil fuel use with solar or wind energy. We feel it is also important to cover how much we use and waste daily; how efficient our energy usage daily is, and how harmful human impacts on the environment are. We will use a hands-on approach that gets students moving and interacting with these topics, because we feel they will identify more with the issue. We ultimately want to empower the youth to take action because they are instrumental in advocating for change.

How to respect mama earth and still get good grades

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While complicated scientific jargon may make understanding environmental issues seem like an impossible challenge, the truth is that our everyday actions have real, important consequences for the environment, and the mission of this blog is to make climate change concrete. To show the ways in which your actions matter. We will challenge and we will educate. We will put the power of climate justice where it belongs: in your hands.

An Ice-Breaker Introduction to Methane Clathrates

Our current world relies heavily on conventional fossil fuels: coal, natural gas, and oil. We're expected to run out of these energy resources by the end of this century at our current rate of consumption. What will we do for energy next? Before we turn to renewable energies, we might look into more unconventional fossil fuels, one of these being methane hydrates.

What you need to know about electricity and magnetism

Most of us give little thought to the act of flipping on a light switch, much less the enormous infrastructure that must go into the vast process of bringing electricity to nearly every corner of our beautiful modern world. And what about the remarkable scientific advancements that brought us from candle light to electrification over the past 100 years? How did that happen? It’s a small dot in the history of humankind, but a time of unparalleled change that revolutionized how we live, think, communicate, treat disease, and interact with the world. Electromagnetism is probably the single-most important scientific advancement in the history of humankind, and we’ll try to understand a bit about it here, at least enough to understand why electricity and magnetism are central to our ability to end our addiction to fossil fuels.

Electric cars, the solution to polluted cities, in the 1830’s!

Walking through London in the 1830’s, you would have had to use a torch to see where you were going — in the middle of the day. The pollution was so bad that darkness descended on industrial cities, at certain times of the year, as it often does today in some parts of China. But at the time, people were thrilled about a new exciting discovery — the electric motor. Trains, cars and even boats would soon be powered by clean electricity rather than coal. It never happened, of course, because people soon realized that batteries didn’t last forever and were tremendously difficult to keep replacing. Despite this spectacular flop, I’m here to tell you that — this time — it’s going to be different!

Why don’t your hands pass through each other?

Rub your hands and you can feel the texture of your skin, the soft muscle tissue wrapped over a hard skeleton. The nuclei of the atoms in your hand contain most of the mass — the heavy part — but they are spaced a surprisingly long distance apart. Consider this: if the nucleus was as big as you are, the next nucleus would be a mile away! There’s a tremendous gap of wide open space between every nucleus in your hand, occupied by essentially nothing, except for the occasional electron. The standard picture of atoms packed tightly together, with electrons spinning around the nucleus, is totally wrong. The real picture is one of mostly empty space. Why then can’t one object pass right through the other? Why doesn’t light pass right through the desk in front of you?

The answer is: the electrons. Electrons float around in the empty space, sometimes tied to a nucleus, sometimes allowed to roam free. It is the repulsive force between the electrons in your hand, and the electrons in whatever you touch, that gives the sensation of “touch.” You are physically feeling electric repulsion — the collision between electrons that don’t want to mix. You are physically seeing the collisions between light and the electrons in the table. These electric forces are strong, they dominate how we interact with the world, and they can generate spectacular effects like the Aurora and lightning. You might wonder why electrons don’t want to mix. Unfortunately, I can’t answer that one. No scientist can — we just don’t know why.

Turning on the light

Electrons move extremely slowly. Getting through a wire is tough work. There’s a lot of bumping into the lattice of the nuclei. Electrons move at about one meter per hour — unbelievably slow. How is it, then, that you can Skype across the world in real time? How is it that you can flip the light switch and immediately the lights flick on?

Think of a long high speed train packed with people. It’s so tight that no one can move. Now try to push someone in at one end of the back car. The only way to let that person in is if someone else gets off at the other end of the train. The only movement that must occur is for everyone to shift down a bit. The actual movement of the people is slow, yet the response of everyone shifting down a bit can propagate along the train at a much higher speed. Pushing electrons down a wire is how we move energy, almost instantaneously, through wires. Plug your cell phone into the wall, and you can’t start charging until someone starts shoving electrons into the wires at a power plant miles away. It’s amazing.

Magnets are magical

You marveled as a little kid at the amazing forces of attraction and repulsion between two magnets, depending on their orientation. It’s a magical force, invisible yet so strong. For all of the 19th century, while the technology of electricity and magnetism was developing, scientists had no idea what was actually going on. It turns out that magnetism is, in part, also a property of electrons. Unlike electric repulsion, however, magnet repulsion has an orientation. The direction in which the electron is pointing determines if the magnetic force is attractive or repulsive. Amazingly, all the electrons in magnetic materials like iron are naturally aligned to point in the same direction. You can think of it as a conspiracy. What is their ultimately goal? No one knows, but I think they are trying to tell us to solve the climate crisis by using the powers of electromagnetism.

Turning wires into magnets

There’s another way to obtain a magnet other than pointing all of the electrons in the same direction. It turns out that running electrons through a wire can also produce a magnet. As the electrons move through the wire, from their perspective, the nuclei in the wire actually contract a little bit, leaving an electric imbalance between the electrons and the nuclei. This contraction is due to the very not-obvious fact that everything that moves actually get squished a tiny amount. You might have heard of Einstein. He figured this out.

The strange thing is that this electric imbalance depends on the direction in which the electrons are moving, similar to how the magnetic force depends on the direction the electrons are pointing. In fact, the direction of the force is the same for these two cases, and everything else about the two forces happens to be the same, so we go ahead and call them both magnetic forces. It’s wild, but you can create a magnet by moving electrons through a wire.

Using magnets to create electricity

I realize that things are starting to get pretty weird, but it gets even worse. Not only can you create a magnet by moving electrons through a wire, but you can also create electricity by moving a magnet nearby a wire.

Take a wire, and take a magnet. Move the magnet. The electrons in the wire will get pushed through the wire by the magnetic force. Essentially, the electrons are responding to the motion of the magnet by turning themselves into a magnet. You can sit there all day and wiggle the magnet back and forth and you’ll get current wiggling back and forth. And that is basically how electricity is generated.

Using electricity to move magnets around

We can also do this in the opposite direction. Take a wire. Run electrons through it. The wire will produce a magnetic force. Place a magnet nearby. The wire-magnet will feel an attraction or repulsion from the magnetic force of the magnet, just like a normal magnet would.

What’s amazingly cool is that you can wrap the wire around a shaft and, together with the nearby magnet and electricity, cause the shaft to turn! And that is basically how an electric motor works.