Table Talk

by Violet Reges and Sabina Vitola

When going about choosing a topic for our podcast, we started brainstorming a list of projects that we could build and create that would merge our two majors (Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering) together. After a long brainstorming session, we chose to design and build a heated wheelchair that was powered by the mechanical motion of the wheels. Then we started researching how this would work.  

We studied how the human body creates heat and what makes people cold. We soon discovered that geriatric people (people over the age of 60) tended to get cold easier than non-geriatric people, because they have a decreased metabolic rate. This decreased metabolic rate lowers the amount of energy that they produce. To be at a comfortable temperature, the environment needs to be taking away as much heat (in Watts) as is being produced in an individual. The average person of non-geriatric age tends to create between 100-120 Watts of energy. Geriatric people make less energy than that, leading them to feel cold at the same temperatures that non-geriatric people feel comfortable. A heated wheelchair would fix this problem. A wheelchair was chosen because as people age, they also begin to lose mobility, thus a heated wheelchair would be beneficial.  

We also studied how mechanical motion was turned into electrical energy a generator. We discovered that inside a generator, a coil of copper wire (because copper is an excellent conductor as it has many valence electrons that can be moved throughout it) and a magnet are spun to create energy. The magnet spins around the copper wire, this induces a current throughout the copper wire which then powers a device. When adding a capacitor (a battery that stores electrical energy) the wheelchairs heating can be used even when not in motion.  

After concluding our research, we created an outline of how we wanted to present our research in our podcast. We decided that the person that did the research for the topic of the podcast episode that we were filming (one on the creation of electricity through rotation, and the other on the heated wheelchair and how geriatric people get cold easier) would be the main speaker and the other would function more as a person who supported and added in other points into the podcast. The second person would act more akin to an interviewer of the researcher’s topic.  

Link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1979027/10495883