Engineering Experience 4: Design a Small Solar Vehicle/2013: Team EM15

Introduction

The Engineering Experience 4 (EE4) for students who major in Electromechanical Egnineering at Group T is bulding a Small Solar Vehicle (SSV). The school provides a solar panel and a DC motor for each team. Every team should design and assemble thier own SSV and take part in a SSV race at the end of this semester.

Team: Basic Information

Team Name

Our team name is , which means that our goal is .

Team Logo

Team Members

Lian Hao (team leader)
Liu Enen
Yu Yang
Chen Shu
Xue Kang
Zhang Jianyuan

General Information

Cooperation Contract

This is to explain the basic information of the team and formulate some rules while working.

Plan of Approach

This file interprets the reason why we do this project and expounds how we can achieve our goal basically.

WBS & Gantt Chart

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and Gantt Chart divide the project into small tasks and determine every member's tasks.

Work Process

Week 1

The coaches introduced the project basically and divided students into different teams. Our team finished Cooperation Contract, Plan of Approach, WBS and Gantt Chart on Friday.

Week 2

Xue Kang

Kang found some information about wheels and bearings which are suitable for our SSV. He did some research on a Maximal Power Point Tracker circuit (MPPT), which can manipulate the voltage and current coming from the solar panel in order to deliver maximal power to the load.

Cheng Shu

Shu found a transmission system without gears, named Continuous Variable Transmission (CVT) specifically. This kind of system can solve the problem of the interrupted transmission while changing gears and any probable gear ratio can be chosen.

All these researches will be discussed next week.

Week 3

Zhang Jianyuan found a holder of GPS to support the solar panel. The device can attach the solar panel by air pressure. The greatest strengh of this device is that it is very flexible so that is can rotate into different directions. In this way we can improve the flexibility of solar panel to make it suitable for any height of the sun.

We discussed the work that was done lask week. We will order three or four wheels and several bearings from the website that Wanja found.

In the seminar the coach introduced something about gear ratio. We will use Matlab to calculate what gear ratio we will use.

We decided develop two projects in parallel, the normal gearbox and the CVT. The better one will be used.

Week 4

According to the requirements of Case SSV Part 1 and Case Simulink, we divided the total tasks into different parts and distributed them to every team member. These tasks are theoretical and hypothetical. When it comes to the practice, some data might be changed.

We designed the frame of our SSV. The basic idea is using triangle frame since we will make a three-wheel car. The bearings will be set at the altitude of the triangle and at a line which is parallel to the base of the triangle. In this way we can fasten the frame and the holder of solar panel can be fixed on this frame. Three wheels will be connected to three vertexs of this triangle frame. Koenraad has designed this frame on a software afterwards.

Week 5

The seminar of this week is given by Lian Hao from Fatlab and we knew how to contact Fatlab to take some useful materials for the SSV. Besides, someone from the Umicore Solar Team gave us a introduction of the Umicar.

The basic tasks of this week are still Case Simulink and Sase SSV 1. We distributed the total tasks to everyone in detials. Tam,Wanja worked on gear ratio. Mao and Hongyang woked on the Sankey Diagram. Luxi focused on the process report. Koenraad,Machiel and Atefeh paid more attention on the Matlab-Simulink. We tried our best to finish every report. Next week is the deadline of these two cases and then we are going to start Case SSV 2, which is building our SSV in reality.

Week 6

This week we have to finish two important reports, Case SSV Part 1 and Case Simulink. Everyone works hard on his or her own part, especially Tam, Atefeh and Wanja. Some problems happen to the Simulink, they spent a lot of time to solve these problems. Finally we finished everything successfully and the final version of gear ratio is 9. Based on this, we modified our Sankey Diagram report and make every report correspond to each other.

There was no seminar Tuesday. The coach Tan Ye told us some information about these two cases' reports and the individual test after the Easter holiday. From next week on we will bulid our SSV in reality and connect Fatlab for some help. The case SSV Part 2 will be started, too. The leader divided the tasks to everyone basically.

Week 7

Due to the analysis of the solar panel, there was a "optimal point" in the current-voltage diagram, which can provide the maximum power to the car. However, we could not insure that the vehicle was work at this point in reality. In order to make sure that the car can work at this "optimal" region, we looked for the help of Prof.Bienstman on Friday, who introduced some related theories briefly to us and offered a PCB to us, which could be useful in our SSV building.

Wanja is in charge of this mainly and we all can assist him.

Easter Holiday

We did our EE4 project at Fablab the first week of Easter holiday. Lian hao designed different kinds of gears according to the calculation, using some hard plastic as material, which was waste in Fablab.These gears look very suitable for our car, both for the shaft of the motor and the bearing. The connection of gears are tight, hope that they can work well for the car.

We use some aluminum bars to make the frame, depending on what we drew in the computer before. The frame is very strong and stiff. And it is quite light. This frame is perfect for our SSV.

Week 8

There was a individual text on Tuesday, which was a theoretical test about Matlab (Simulink) and SSV Part 1. We can use each team's report as references in the test.

Yu Yang made a fantastic "DC-motor holder" for our SSV. This holder can be attached to the frame perfectly tightly. And it is not cheap, of course. We assembled bearings and three wheels, which are from Australia, to the frame. Besides, we attached the base plate of the solar-panel-holder to the frame, too. So far the basic model of our SSV was accomplished.