current from the kitchen – Adam Merbah – Results and question
for this lab, we tested the amount of volts that each fruit can produce. we tested 8 fruits. i thought the lemon would produce the most voltage. why do i think the lemon can produce the most? because of the citric acid
here are the results of all the fruits that we tested.
As you can see, the dragon fruit gave out the most voltage
Observations:
- As we were testing, our fruits were giving out zero volts. we were very confused considering every other group was getting volts from the same fruits we tested. We tried switching the voltmeter and it turns out that it wasn’t the voltmeter, it was our wires that weren’t working.
- the citrus fruits seemed to do very well with the amount of voltage they had. But, the dragon fruit had the most.
- with the slightest movement of the table, the volt meter will go up and down. so, we needed to be very careful with making contact with the table.
here are some pictures of the procedure
Explanation: For our currents from the kitchen lab, we had several fruits come in to class. We tried to figure out how much electric voltage can each fruit produce. Here’s how it went : we cut the fruits in half to share for the class. the materials were a voltmeter, a nail, a piece of copper, two alligator wires and safety goggles to protect our eyes. we stuck a piece of copper and a nail into the fruit. We then took an two alligator wires and attached one to the copper and the other to the nail. we took both ends of the wires and clipped them on to the volt meter, testing different maximum voltage. We took note of the results and put them on a table in a word document that can be found above.
prompting questions:
What kind of circuit will produce electron flow in your fruit?
a circuit with a positive terminal and a negative terminal. when you connect the two wires, a circuit is formed.
if your bulb doesn’t glow, how can you find out if electrons are flowing?
the way you can find out if electrons are flowing is if there is a number on the volt meter. so if it shows voltage in the fruit, it means it was able to create an electron flow from the fruit to the voltmeter.
if your bulb doesn’t glow, why not?
if your bulb doesn’t glow, it can either mean that there is no voltage being produced, or sometimes there isn’t enough voltage to make your bulb glow.
how can we modify our experiment to improve our results?
something we could have done better was try and put the alligator clips on the voltmeter in different positions to see if it would improve the voltage. Also, we could have tried to put the copper and nail in the fruit a bit deeper or maybe in different parts of the fruit.
what is causing electrons to flow in my experiment?
The copper, nail, alligator wires and the liquid from the fruits caused the electron flow. the nail and copper were gathering the voltage and the wires were picking it up into the voltmeter.
How can i use this in my everyday life?
if the power ever goes out, i can hook up a bunch of voltmeters and light bulbs to make light with the fruits.
