Events

Team 613.2 was tasked with making a perpetual motion machine. Due to the second law of thermodynamics, stating that energy movement is unpredictable and irreversible in a realistic environment, these machines are impossible. This team was not to create the impossible but pretend like we did, creating a machine that merely looked like it was perpetually moving without any outside power input. To do this the team needed to create two things, a red herring to show that supposedly caused the perpetual motion, and a hidden driver that actual drove this motion.

This team decided to use the water differential created by capillary action as our red herring. Capillary action tubes use a liquids surface tension to pull the water level within it up. Using this and a buoyant string, it would seem as if the difference in the force of buoyancy would cause movement. However, this is untrue, as the force required to submerge this buoyant line cancels out any force differential created by the different water level. So, to drive the machine, the team hid a motor behind a wall and used a magnetic coupler to move the outside wheel. A magnetic coupler uses magnetic fields to couple movement between a motor and a wheel with out any physical contact needing to be made. These two together allowed for a seemingly perpetual motion machine to be created.

This project shows that not everything that would make sense to the naked eye is true, and looking deeper into a claim is always important in the engineering process.

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