Looking to the End of this Design Cycle

With only a few weeks left to prepare for the end of the semester, design time is running short to finalize our work. Since David DeOcampo and I have been busy working on management duties for Pod Car City 9 and the like it has fallen on the rest of the Intermediate Solar team to do the bulk of the work recently. I'm happy to say they've been doing well without us, but we're excited to get back to work on our solar team to help them push through the last phase of design. Completing a calculator tool is high on the priority list so that we can adapt our system to whatever the other subgroups throw at us, as is completing the mounting design for our solar cells.

Aftermath of Pod Car City 9

Last week the Spartan Superway team hosted students from across the country and engineers from around the world in the Pod Car City 9 Icebreaker event. Some of our colleagues from Southern Illinois University's college of Architecture hosted a Student Design Challenge that we were lucky enough to participate in, and throughout the day we received ample media coverage from local radio stations, foreign news and blogs/podcasts, and even NBC Bay Area. Thanks to all the reporters who showed up to give our project some exposure, and to San Jose State's Media Relation Specialist Robin McElhatton for making it all possible. Special thanks to Riya Battacharjee and Scott Budman for the great piece they produced for NBC Bay Area.

Lemelson-MIT Student Prize

In recent weeks the Spartan Superway Management Team has been working on applications for the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize in hopes of securing some extra funding for the team. The initial application was accepted and the group has moved on to the next round of applications for the Drive It! Category. The application was submitted November 3rd and we are eagerly awaiting the results. A reward form this prize could secure more than $10,000 in funding which would be a substantial amount to put toward development.

Update for Recent Weeks

In the past couple of weeks the Spartan Superway has been preoccupied with group presentations; sub-team work time has been limited because of this. Although we have less time to work on our sub-team projects it is really good to know where all the other groups are at with their own work. It also gives us a chance to communicate with the group as a whole which is helpful; it lets us know what information we can expect from other groups as well as what information they expect and need from our own group.

Even presentations taking a good portion of our time has not stopped our own sub-team's progress though! We have members researching configurations, drafting plans for a  mounting system and analyzing different solar cell arrays.

After analyzing a concave, convex, and strictly planar arrangement of cells it turns out that the curvature decreases the amount of energy produced by the cell. Very generous estimation for reflected light absorbed by the cell (about 5%) only marginally increased gains. It is better to exclude reflection from the results for a very important reason: reflected light from a cell is light energy that was lost to the cell; for this reason many modern solar panels are coated with anti reflective layer.

This makes sense, specifically when looking at the MiaSole panels we are using. They are not very reflective due to their thin-film design; a mono- or poly-crystalline panel might have more reflectivity due to its glass base though.