Our senior design project is an International Capston Design Project in which we hope to harness micro-meso scale energy using piezoelectric and triboelectric materials. This week we mainly focused on learning about the two technologies, how they work and what the benefits are of both. We discussed with our advisor on what the application would be before we started designing …
Raider’s Chassis is Coming Along Nicely
After seeing our last year’s car in competition last year, the SAE Baja team is designing Raider (our 2016 car) to be significantly different from its predecessor. The vehicle will be shorter by almost 20 inches and considerably lighter in an effort to achieve the agility that the competition series calls for. We’ve made good progress on our chassis in …
Fuel Cells for Data Centers – Project Update
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 …
Evolution of Learning
On team HyperXite, we go beyond classroom learning and provide students with the skills of teamwork and manufacturing through designing, manufacturing and testing a product that has never been made before. We stretch the limits by providing students with the opportunity to communicate effectively the details of a component that does not exist yet and teach each other how each …
Researching design, materials and costs
After researching what materials were needed, we showed our advisor what we planned to do with these materials. Our advisor approved the materials we had in mind and were purchased. In order to pick which materials we needed, we compared and contrasted the pros and cons of each material. Taking in consideration of the costs we purchased the materials which …
Project Requirements (Week 3)
This week we discussed the goals and requirements of our project. Our advisor guided to us on what we needed to research and gave us some informative links. After that we presented what we had found to our advisor at the end of the week.
Solar Plane Proposal and Initial Flight Conditions
For the past week, we have been working on the UROP proposal to request funding for our project. We have completed the task timeline for the academic year as well as the itemized budget for our project. We have also determined the flight conditions for the Solar Plane for which our first design will be based upon. _Altitude: 5000 ft …
Let Them Play!
TOYS. I like to think in certain aspects I have not allowed myself to grow up, playing with toys being one of those aspects. Toys are one of those things that makes people happy. It can bring out creativity, encourage sharing and positive interactions with others, teach in a more hands-on way. When I heard about this project at the …
Circular UAV Project : Basic Requirements
For the past week, our Circular UAV project team 1. updated the weight estimate for the current design. 2. came up with some basic requirements for our Circular UAV including, Rate of Climb : 600 ft/min Range : 3 miles Endurance : 15-20 minutes Stall speed : 16.13 ft/sec (hand launch) 3. calculated the wing loading, wing area, and aspect …
Solar Thermal Energy Storage, Smart Phone App, and More
The Thermal Energy group is dedicated to design an efficient yet compact solar thermal energy storage (STES) system, and eventually create a prototype. Our research objective is to minimize the trade-off between renewable energy variations in order to expand the application of thermal energy storage beyond industrial utilization. Ultimately, our storage design will allow for all components to be scaled …