Matthew Argall was awarded the Faculty Innovation Grant by the UNH Hamel Honors and Scholars Program. The Honors College facilitates innovations in education by providing faculty a means for cross-college collaboration to experiment with unique, high-impact learning experiences without going through the full process of developing a credit-bearing course, laboratory, or field experience.
The project, titled “A Lightning Course in Experimentation and Observation” is a cross-college collaboration between Matthew Argall (Physics, EOS/SSC), Ningyu Liu (Physics, EOS/SSC), Michael Cardereli (COLA), Qiaoyan Liu (ECE), and Ivaylo Nedyalkov (ME). The objective of this project is to create a weather station that combines a lightning rod, rogowski coil, and camera to take high speed measurements and pictures of natural lightning in the Durham area, then design laboratories that provide hands-on activities to learn about photography, instrument design and fabrication, and lightning.
The weather station will be deployed at a remote UNH location to capture photographic and electrical current data of lightning strikes. The data is incorporated into a series of laboratory activities focused on general photography principles, measurement techniques, electrical and mechanical design, and data analysis. The learning outcomes of the labs are to 1) Understand camera fundamentals such as controlling exposure, ISO, aperture and shutter speed; 2) Understand design and operating principle of a rogowski coil and its subassemblies; 3) Understand how lightning flash affects the surrounding air to produce the resulting current profile. Students participating in the labs will have hands-on experience taking pictures, performing measurements, designing the measurement system, and analyzing data – all to better understand lightning.
Learn more about the Honors College here.
