Solar Investigation

Solar power plays a key role in the operation of the Spartan Superway Automated Transit Network (ATN). Without power, passengers who board these pods are stranded, transit congestion will cause the whole system to become inoperative, and destroy the idea of being sustainable if we don't have reliable power to operate the Superway. From reading last year's report, the previous team came up with an great way to power the Superway. The previous team implemented a single-axis tracking system for the solar panels after weighing the advantages and disadvantages of different aspect of the Superway. The team decided to implement the single-axis tracking system because we are located on the Northern hemisphere and will benefit from direct sunlight coming from the East to the West. They also decided to use thin-film solar panels because of low cost and the ability to bend the solar panels as seen in the picture below: 

 

As seen in the picture below, the design of a single-axis tracker is implement on the full scale model:



Initially, I thought the idea was great because having a single-axis tracker will generate the most efficiency when generating power for the Superway. But after hearing opinions from my teammates and mentors, we figure it would be best if we had stationed solar panels. The reason we want to implement stationed solar panel is the idea revolving around reliable power. Solar trackers are more prone to errors compared to stationed solar panels. Building a solar tracker require more material and coding to operate. The light sensor, linear actuator, and controller box will malfunction at some point in time, and if it does, the solar tracker will become inoperative, and different problem will arise.

For the next meeting, we hope to narrow down on what we can achieve as a team. There are still ideas floating in the air and we want to dive deeper into our discussion for the solar field of this project.

Reference:

https://www.inist.org/library/2015-05-21.Ornellas%20et%20al.Spartan%20Superway%202014-2015%20Final%20Report.SJSU%20ME195.pdf