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)

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Week 3 (June 19-23)

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...

Week 6 (July 10-14)

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)

Spartan Superway Summer Internship (2017)

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