Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “2015-2016 Fuel Cell Data Center”
Our biggest accomplishment this week was that our team came in 5th place out of the 26 teams that participated for the winter peer review. Because we placed in the top 7, we were invited to present to industry representatives on March 11th. This quarter our team was more prepared due to the constructive criticism we received from the fall …
This week we prepared for the Quarterly Peer Review. It was very nice to have our advisor attend and support us as we presented. Mike did a great job putting together everyone’s presentation materials and leading the presentation. We sent out the purchase orders for some parts we needed to fix the cooling system, and we received them this week. …
This week we are continuing our MATLAB fuel cell model. This model will be able to tell us how much electricity the fuel cell can output depending on the higher heating value (HHV) of our fuel cell and a varying efficiency. This efficiency depends on changing temperature and desired power output. This is the base load for the data center. …
This week we completed the modeling for the electrolyzer and hydrogen storage tank. Now we must model the fuel cell to determine how much electricity can be sent to the data center from the fuel cell. Once we complete the fuel cell model, we will be able to model the entire system. Our fuel cell cooling team has completed a …
Starting week one, we have lost a team member. This brings us down from seven to six members. This week we have been progressing on the modeling for the electrolyzer and the hydrogen storage tanks. This will allow us to determine how much hydrogen the electrolyzer can output based off of a certain amount of PV energy. In addition, one …
Our MATLAB team has been working away at creating a model that allows us to find the payback period for a fully solar model. We have also been researching how fuel cells work so that we can properly model the fuel cell component of the system. Fuel cells are complicated and only one of our teammates has taken the fuel …
During Week 8, we took apart some of the exhaust system of the fuel cell to troubleshoot why this portion of the cooling system does not work. After electrically testing the exhaust fan, we found that the fan works but the potentiometer does not work. We have designed a solar panel array structure and are awaiting confirmation with our advisor …
We successfully submitted our UROP proposal in hopes of obtaining funding for our project. Due to a roadblock in our project, we needed to meet with our professional engineer for some consulting on the project. Mr. Hack, our mechanical professional engineer, had a meeting with us on 11/4/2015, to discuss where the solar panels will be placed, recommendations on our …
This week was all about overcoming major design problems and finalizing decisions. Our group had been told to set up our solar array in one location, while our fuel cell was on the opposite end of the building. One of our team members showed that the low voltage, high amperage DC current we were planning on using would suffer massive …
This blog will be an overall update to cover all the topics that would have been discussed in the previous blogs. Our team is in charge of the research, design, and implementation of renewable and sustainable energy resources to power a 6 kW data center. This is scaled to represent a 100 MW data center. Our faculty advisor, Dr. Jack …
