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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)

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