Full-Scale Solar Team

On the week of 10/24, The Full-Scale Solar is working on several aspects of our design specifications, along with intra-team communications with the Guideway and Wayside Power Teams. For the design specifications work, the team has broken the problems into 4 tasks, 1.  Talking to the guideway team to figure out specific requirements based on their guidelines and see if we need to scale down our project or anything along the lines of support the mount x 6. 2.  Talk about how our solar panel mount will support the panels and how to fit the panels from underneath instead of from above. 3.  How to connect each piece of the mount to each other, is it going to be a solder, is it going to be bolts, screws, etc.. 4.  Figure out how to communicate with our sub teams, and with the team, more effectively than it has been. once a plan has been settled with each of these aspects, the plan will be presented to Dr. Furman and Mr. Swenson for additional recommendations and...

On the week of 10/17/18, the Solar Canopy continued to discuss the improvements of the current solar panel mount. Currently, all members are working on concept model ideas, as well as methods on how to fix the solar panel mount to the guideway. Seeing as that the guideway is not a solid block, the mount would have to be fixed on two opposite ends and would make the design to be aware of this, because it cannot have too much stress in a spot where it is not properly loaded. Specifications from the guideway team are coming soon, before next week's meeting. Energy requirements from the wayside team have also been changed from 340 Kilojoules to 450 Kilojoules, pushing us to be more conscience about having more solar panels on our design. If we have too many panels on the design, it will not fit or it will be too angular for design, but if we have too little, we will not meet the energy requirement in a reasonable time frame, seeing as that the average panel delivers only 60 Watts. This...

For the week of 10/10/18 the Solar Canopy team discussed more ideas and tasks that can be added to the Gantt chart. The Solar Canopy team also observed a "prototype" sketch of a canopy on SolidWorks with existing parameters and specifications. The Solar Canopy team touched bases with related sub-teams to make sure we are on the same page. In addition to all of this, the Solar Canopy team will be preparing for the second presentation that will happen on 10/24. Current Design Canopy Mount Functional Specifications: Canopy Width: 6m Guideway Span Length: 3m Solar Module: 1m x 1.6m x 1m Estimated Weight for aluminum mount:  44.5 kg - 222.4 kg Estimated Cost for system max: $600-$700 Energy needed by panels (still work in progress with wayside team): 340 KJ Still currently working on specs with Guideway team, but we have a couple of specifications for the whole support system 10/8/18-10/12/18

For the week of 10/3/18 our team met with Professor Furman and Ron Swenson to discuss some ideas on how to further develop the design of the solar canopy. We also spoke to Brad Diaz who is also interested in helping out with the progress of our project. Thanks to this meeting we now have several parameters on which we can work on and a better vision of what our end product might look like. 10/1/18-10/5/18