Soh cah toa. You may remember learning these terms in school but is this useful. In this project we used trigonometry to find the ideal angle for making the best possible solar panel. Seems like a straight forward project right?
First i had to search around the internet because I don’t know much about solar panels. Next I wanted to find what angle is the best to get maximum sunlight. To do this you have to put a few things into consideration like, weather and where you live. The website solar power is the future said that to find your angle you take the latitude of where you live and in summer you take away 15 and in winter you add 15.
Winter: The latitude for North Vancouver is 49.2827 + 15= 64°
Summer: The latitude for North Vancouver is 49.2827 – 15= 34°
To help us understand this concept we did a lab on how to find the ideal angle. The materials Kate and I used for this project was a voltmeter, a source of light which we used the lights in the classroom, and test dividers which is blocks and flat pieces of wood. We wrote down the angle, length, height and volt meter reading each time we raised the angle withe the blocks.
As you can see the highest voltmeter reading was 1.54 which was when we had a angle of 21.5. Next we took a photo of the best angle and labeled it in notability. Kate and I struggled trying to find the angle that the sun is hitting the solar panel because it wasn’t and exact 90° angle like my project ended up being.
After the lab I was ready to continue with my project. For my model I used the angle I got for summer 34°. To get the side lengths I decided the hypotenuse was going to be 18cm and then used Soh to get the opposite and the adjacent sides.
Once I had my side lengths I was able to measure them out on my model of a building. I cut out the length for the hypotenuse and the opposite on a piece of cardboard and taped them together. To personalize my model and I spray painted it gold in my garage. After I stuck the side lengths on the model i used a protracted to make sure it was the correct angle. Then I added the side lengths and angle on my model as well as a sun.
Once I was done completing my model I decided to make a keynote presentation of my solar panel.