Here we look at how you can get the most power out of a solar pnael or wind turbine.
Youtube video, suitable whether of not you have the board with you.
See board images.
Tutorial guide for when you have the board with you.
As you can see, we have three boards here. One contains 8 small solar panel wired together and when these are placed in a well-lit area, they will produce electricity. Natural light will create far more electricity than artificial light. Make sure the toggle switch on the dummy load board means you are connected to the solar panel and not the wind turbine. The amount of power we get from the panels can be seen on the second board. This contains a meter that gives us three values. The first (V) is the electrical pressure (push) we get across the panel and that is measured in volts. The second value A is the current that is flowing round our circuit and this is measured in amps. Now the third value W is the power we get from the panel and that is the other two values multiplied together. We measure power in watts. Normally we have to use a calculator to work out the power, but here the meter is doing it for us. Both the current A and the power W values are very small so rather than talk about amps and watts we are going to talk about milli-amps and milli-watts. One milli-amp for example is 0.001 amps. So just take the three numbers on the right side of the dot and that will give us the milli-amps or milli-watts. All this means the power we are getting from the panel is very small, but that doesn’t really matter, this is a demonstration!
Now to get the most power from the panel we have to make sure we give it the best load. In this example that is the resistors on the second board. This will turn the power it gets from the solar panel into heat. There will not be much because there is very little power here, but if there were more the resistors would get warm.
Now if the total value of the resistors is the right amount, we will get more power from the solar panel. Resistors give something called resistance, if we give the panels too much of this it will reduce the flow of current, if we have too little resistance then it will reduce the voltage. Getting exactly the right amount is critial. Use the switches that include or bypass two of the resistors to try and get the watts value as high as possible.
When you have done that, you can switch our board to take power from the mini wind turbine and you can use the switches to get the most power out of that.
Some follow-up ideas to try...
Remember that:
W means Watts,
Kw means Killowatts (one thousand watts),
Mw means Megawatts (one million watts).