Skip to main content

Week 1 (June 5-9)

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 grid.  In the case of too much solar power, the excess electricity from the solar panels would be sold back to the city.


Figure 1:  Wayside power rails on the half-scale track.  (Photo by Kevin Leong)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 9 (July 31 - August 4)

One of the collector shoe guides have been built and installed to an end of the track.  The installed collector shoe guide is shown in Figure 1.  The collector shoes slide between the wheels and into the wayside power rails.  Wires connecting to the battery have also been installed to the rails.  Wires from the previous Wayside Power Team are reused.  The ends of the wires are repaired where needed and zip ties are used to keep the wires organized on the track.  A multimeter is placed at the other end of the rails to ensure that the transfer of electricity through the wayside power rails is successful.  We have also finished the final report this week. Figure 1:  Installed collector shoe guide. (Photo by Kevin Leong) Figure 2:  Fixing and organizing wires. (Photo by Kevin Leong)
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 8 (July 24-28)

The design for the collector shoe guides had been changed slightly.  The outer lip, or wall, on the guide is not needed.  We realized that the collector shoes do not hang lower than the guide.  In addition,  the curves on the guide that push the collector shoes into position are difficult to create.  Instead, extra wheels that the bogie team no longer needed were used in place of the curves.  We also spent this week writing the majority of the final report.
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 2 (June 12-16)

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...
Post a Comment
Read more