Last Friday, we met with Terry Wang in order to discuss our deliverables for this quarter. We discussed the tasks each member is responsible for. It seems as though we are in good shape as long as we continue to stay motivated.

Our poster which won the Dean’s Choice Award is now on display at UCI’s Ayala Science Library along with other award-winning posters.

Because UROP provided us with $700 of funding, we submitted the abstract for their symposium which will take place in May. On top of UROP we are also responsible for reporting our progress to The Green Initiative Fund (TGIF) who provided us with $3500 of funding.

We have not had much luck with solar mounting companies. We contacted a few companies, and all of them have been unsuccessful. Some mounts are too small, some don’t allow orders that are below a certain threshold of quantity, and some have just not replied to us at all. We are currently investigating making our own mounting system with steel strut as a contingency. Sadly adjustable, pre-fabricated mounting systems are all too small, so this will not be our route.

Mike has been working on making testing kit mounting structure to place on the solar panel mounts to easily access the device while testing. Additionally, he is adding some new features to the code to add functionality.

At the meetings we have been discussing how Aaron will go about creating the cost analysis for our modeled plant. We want to know how much money would be used or saved when comparing the operational costs of our plant to the health costs in a polluted environment. Another thing we would like to work on is the efficiency of our model.

We figured out the problem with strut. It seems that there was a miscommunication on the units they were charging us for. We assumed that 10ft of strut would cost $8.21, in reality it was per foot. We are looking into more cost effective suppliers to reduce the cost.