Spartan Superway Summer Internship (2017)

By the end of this week, all of the wayside power rails have been installed for the half-scale track.  Guides for the collector shoes need to be installed at the ends of the wayside power rails.  The purpose of a guide to gently feed a freely dangling pair of collector shoes back into a pair of wayside power rails.  This occurs during a track change, in which a pair of collector shoes derails from the wayside power rails on one side of the track.  Another pair of collector shoes needs to be guided back into the wayside power rails on the other track.  We brainstormed ideas for how the collector shoe guides should be made.  Tan was able for draw out a model of the guide using SolidWorks, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1:  Model of a collector shoe guide. (Drawn by Tan Ho)

We continued to install wayside power rails for the other half of the track.  However, we were unable to finish the installation because we realized that there were some errors when measuring the small rectangular copper pieces that serve as the rail connectors at the joints.  As a result, many of the holes on the pieces had to be redrilled and new pieces had to be cut.  48V need to be provided to the wayside power rails.  We have not yet heard back from the manufacturer of the 48V LiFeO4 GMET TS116 batteries about why they are not outputting 48V.  A few weeks ago, we charged up both batteries using three SoloPower SFX1-I70 solar panels connected to an Anada PV60 charge controller.  We also charged it up using the IP53 48V-30A charger connected to an outlet.  Regardless of how the batteries were charged, we were unable to get an output of 48V. Figure 1:  48V LiFeO4 GMET TS116 batteries. (Photo by Andrew Lu)

The wayside power rails for half of the half-scale track have been installed successfully.   Initially, we planned to carve the inner lining of the PVC pipe to make room for the small rectangular copper piece that is used to hold two sections of rail together at each joint.  However, we decided this is too time-consuming and there is an easier way to solve the problem.  Instead of carving the PVC pipe, we simply placed copper piece behind the PVC pipe, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1:  Copper rail connector piece placed behind PVC pipe. (Photo by Andrew Lu) The front of the joint is shown in Figure 2:  The modified collector shoes have been tested to be able to easily glide across the joint.  There is no more overlapping of copper rails and the screws are flush with the surface of the copper rail. Figure 2:  Two sections of copper rail joined together. (Photo by Andrew Lu)