Spartan Superway Summer Internship (2017)

The process of renovating the rails continued into the beginning of this week.  However, plans had to be change.  Keeping the original design of overlapping the rails would save time, but it is not the best solution to the problem.  Overlapping copper rails according to the direction of the movement of the collector shoes would still be too rough for the collector shoes to glide through each joint.  Having the collector shoes glide from a higher copper rail to a lower rail meant that the collector shoe would have to face an abrupt drop at each joint.  This unnecessarily enhances the wear and tear on the copper collector shoe and the wayside power rails.  A new design for the wayside power rails is to make a diagonal cut at each end of the copper rails and also drill one hold at each end for screws.  A model of the new design is shown in Figure 1.  The ends of two sections of copper rail would fit together like a puzzle piece.  The purpose of ...

The process of renovating  the wayside power rails began this week.  The previous way of connected the copper wayside power rails is shown in Figure 1.  One of the problems is that the position of the overlapping is not consistent throughout each joint on the half-scale model.  Therefore, the collector shoe could glide from a higher rail to a lower rail at one joint, but glide from a lower to higher rail at another joint.  The collector shoe is unable to glide from a lower to higher copper rail because the shoe would crash into the joint and prevent it from gliding.  In addition, the screw at each joint sticks out just enough to get the shoe caught on the screw even with the modified collector shoes. Figure 1:  Original way of joining together the copper rails.  (Drawn by Tan Ho) The original design of the wayside power rails is retained as much as possible to decrease the amount of time needed to renovate the power rails.  The prior de...

Several pairs of current collectors were available for us to use.  The current collectors are mounted on the bogie and used to pick up the electricity from the wayside power rails.  The current wayside power rails are made by hot-gluing and screwing copper rails into cut-open PVC pipes that serve as insulation.  However, this design of the power rails does not create a smooth enough power rail for the current collector to glide along.  The company that manufactured the current collectors, Kyec, also sells insulated copper rails that were made specifically for the Kyec current collectors to easily glide through.  However, due to the expensive cost and the great amount of time it would take for delivery, we decided to figure out a way to fix the existing power rails.  The main reason why the power rails are not smooth enough is because of how the copper rails are connected at the joints. Two copper rails are overlapped and a single screws holds both rails tog...

This is my first week as an intern at Spartan Superway.  For the first day of this week, I looked over the final reports that past interns have written.  From the reports, I got the general idea of how wayside power should work and what designs the past interns have done.  I also did research about some of the components that were available for the wayside power team.  For example, I had to figure out what the charge controller is used for.  The charge controller is place between the solar panels to the batteries.  The job of the charge controller is to regulate the charge of the batteries that store the electricity from the solar panels.  The wayside power team is focused on harvesting the energy from the sun via solar panels.  Solar energy is the primary source of energy for the entire Spartan Superway transportation network.  In an emergency situation in which solar power alone is not enough, then electricity would be taken from the city g...