Spartan Superway Summer Internship (2017)

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...