Material Availability
Easily available from the drugstore or your home.
Approximate Time Required to Complete the Project
About a day
Objective
To understand how you can create your own Faraday Cage!
Materials and Equipment / Ingredients
A cell phone
Tin Foil
A radio
A walky-talky
Introduction
What happens if you are in a car that gets struck by lightning? Would you die? The answer is that you'd never be able to work that car again, but you would feel nothing at all. You'd walk away just fine! Why is that? It's because of a principal that Faraday discovered. If external waves like lightning or radio waves encounter an outer shell made of a material that conducts electricity, all of the charge will go into the shell, and the item inside will feel no effect at all! But does this work on all objects? What about a radio? Or a cell phone?
Research Questions
How can you stop electromagnetic radiation from penetrating a certain area?
What kinds of radiation does it block?
Terms, Concepts and Questions to Start Background Research
What is electromagnetic radiation?
How do Faraday Cages work?
What are radio waves and how do they compare to lightning?
Experimental Procedure
Find a cell phone, and wrap it in tin foil.
Try to call this cell phone. Do you hear it ringing?
Now turn on the radio and wrap it in tin foil. Does it still work?
Take one of the walky-talkies and wrap it in tin foil. Attempt to communicate with it from the second walky-talky. Do you hear any signal?