Week 5: Presentation 1

This week, sub-teams for full scale and half scale parts of the Spartan Superway had a presentation. Each team's presentation helped our group to think more into the incorporating the rack design with overall design. I took a note on each team's presentation style, so our team could improve our presentation slides later. Mentors of Spartan Superway and its members gave the team feedback on what to improve and commented on the presentation slides. For our team, we will start working on sketching solar panels design as well as the rack system using Solidworks.

Week 4: Possible Design Change | Second Presentation Preparation

This week, our team members consulted with Dr. Furman about the design change in our solar panels rack design. We planned to orient the solar panels in different directions to unload the weight on the beams that are connected between poles. Also, the angle of solar panels have to be considered to maximize the electricity generation.

As the second presentation was being prepared, I learned that there are few additions that could be done in our solar rack design system. First of all, batteries could be placed at each station where pods will be stopping by as a departure/arrival location. They would supply electricity to pods, which makes pods to leave the departure station. Another possibility is to have batteries or capacitors attached by the solar panels throughout the entire guideways.

Week 3: Second Presentation Preparation | Possible Design Iterations

This week, I have worked on the second presentation looked into combining capacitor or electrical energy storage into our solar panels rack system. Since the pod would require high power output to operate, electricity has to be ready to be used whenever it is possible. This would have to be worked together with other full scale subteams to keep the aesthetics and safety of the entire structure.

To know which method would be best to store electricity generated from the solar energy, I need to read through past projects' research. This part of the solar panels racking system could be figured out later throughout the academic semester, but I thought brainstorming it would save us some time later since the design would not need to be changed drastically. Thus, save time later in the semester. Electricity storage system of the rack system could be one of the iterations of our designs.

Week 2: First Team Meeting and Formation

On August 30th, first meeting of Spartan Superway was held at Spartan Superway Design Center. Eric and Dr. Furman assigned a group of two or three students for each subteam. I was assigned to the solar for full-scale futran section with Tan Ho and Matthew Dianich. Our team will be working on how to make a more efficient the solar panels racking system than the one that was designed in last academic year.

We discussed what we need to read through for the next few weeks. Our team member Tan Ho have created a temporary gantt chart to create a rough plan for the semester/year. On September 6th, our team will be having 5 minute lightning talk to discuss what our team has read and our goals will be. To understand the previous models better, our team plans to do a number of reading on all of the information regards to previous models.