Weeks 11-12 Progress Report

Updated Gantt Schedule (barring date updates) to account for the recent parallelization.

The time off from school allowed us both to work on our independent projects. As we had planned to in the previous progress report, we branched off into different sectors: Allen focused on capturing raw data from gait analyses in order to determine a theoretical yield of kinetic energy produced by walking, and Max ventured off into the 3D modeling world to construct a design for the magnetic ball track we will be implementing into our generator. Unfortunately, he has "boycotted" against making blog posts, but he is without a doubt doing great work.
Allen used a clip of himself filmed (by Max) with a 60 fps camera walking on a treadmill. Using Kinovea, he was able to track the movement of his outer knee by using the "tracking tool" to follow a neon orange sticker placed on the knee. From here, he was able to compute a lot of data, from horizontal velocity to position to speed. But what he was looking for most was angular velocity, or the velocity of an object rotating along an axis. He has the stored stored on Excel and in the form of a graph, which he plans on taking the average of, either as a whole or per walking cycle. The point is to try to obtain a theoretical value for kinetic energy generated. The formula for rotational kinetic energy is .5(angular velocity)(moment of inertia). The angular velocity has been collected, but the moment of inertia, or the point mass with respect to a rotating axis, will be harder to derive. That will be Allen's main focus for next week: continue to work on the calculation of the theoretical kinetic energy generated, specifically by computing the moment of inertia. Max will touch up the 3D model by adding thickness to the tracking, and possibly step into circuit designing.

Graph of Angular Velocity (rad/s) vs. Time (ms)