Building an inertia dynamometer with vocational students: a low-budget apparatus for teaching rotational dynamics

Abstract

We report the design, construction, and classroom use of a low-cost inertia dynamometer, built as a year-long project-based learning (PBL) activity with adult students at a Greek Evening Vocational High School (EPAL). The apparatus consists of a machined steel drum of calculated moment of inertia $I = 0.6507~\mathrm{kg\,m^2}$, mounted on a student-welded frame and instrumented with a green-laser / light-dependent resistor (LDR) optical interrupter. The analogue output is sampled at 44.1\,kHz by the microphone input of a laptop computer, which is used as an opportunistic analogue-to-digital converter; torque and power curves are then reconstructed in software from the inter-pulse intervals via $\tau = I\alpha$ and $P = \tau\omega$. The drum's moment of inertia is cross-checked by an inclined-plane rolling experiment. A wide-open-throttle test with a 50\,cc scooter reproduces the expected flat-power / falling-torque signature of a continuously variable transmission in the low-to-moderate RPM range; the LDR's millisecond-scale recovery time imposes an upper bandwidth limit that provides an unplanned but pedagogically rich lesson in sensor physics. The project integrated industrial-lathe fabrication, arc welding, analogue electronics, and numerical differentiation into a single coherent workflow. We describe the apparatus, the physics, the signal-processing pipeline (for which MATLAB and Python/Octave code are provided as supplementary material), and reflect on the pedagogical outcomes for a student population traditionally disengaged from abstract physics.