Colin Ilas, Jr.

During week 5 of the Spartan Superway internship, I began converting my drawings to sheet metal. In my previous design, I had created a design that called for sourcing outside materials and requiring welding to put the pieces together. By using sheet metal, we can reduce costs and manufacturing time, thus overall increasing build efficiency. To do this, I spent a good part of the week learning how to utilize the Sheet Metal function in Solidworks. I first began by creating the outer unit that will bolt the panels onto the L beams. We also learned that the track will now be wider, so I remade the design to accommodate for this change. In the pictures below, you can see the difference between the first design and the new sheet metal design. The new sheet metal design features thicker flanges which should help it hold its shape and be more structurally sound. Figure 1: Older design Figure 2: New sheet metal rack design The advantages of using sheet metal is that they can ...

During our 4th week, I began working on side solar panel mounts for our track system. Although solar panels generally do not receive enough sunlight when mounted vertically to be efficient, we will be using them to match the aesthetic that we have with the curved top solar panel array. In order to do this, we first need to create mounts for our side I beams. This first design I came up with was made to slide from below and up the side on the beam. However, I later found that there may be obstacles in the way such as bracing and other parts, so this idea was scrapped. Figure 1: First side bracket idea In order to accommodate any obstacles, I created a three piece design that features an L bracket on both inner sides of the beam and a main plate to hold the panels together. This desi3gn will be able to everything together using holes in the I beams, while still being able to be adjusted vertically for slight changes. Figure 2: Inner I beam brackets   Figure 3: I...

During this third week I began creating designs for our solar panel mounting system. We plan to mount our whole assembly onto L-beams located at the top of the tracks. In order to do this, we planned to create friction mounts to the beams, followed by a custom rack for the panels. The first step before mounting the panels is to create our foundation. Because we are attaching to L beams and do not want to drill into them, we needed to create friction mounts. To do this, I created an upper and lower mount that will squeeze onto the L beam. This allows for a secure connection as well as being able to slide back and forth along the rail for easy adjustment. Figure 1: Friction mounts for L beams The next step was to plan out how we wanted our solar panels to be. We created a curved array for aesthetic reasons, and measuring the width across the tracks we found that we could mount 4 panels side-by-side in portrait orientation. We have not decided on the exact solar panels, so we u...

For the second week of this internship, I began drawing up some designs in CAD for our mounting and racking system for the solar panels. Our goals are to create a curved array for aesthetics and panels accessible from below the canopy for easy repairs, if needed. First, I created a 5x25 solar panel array with angles that begin from 10 degrees all the way down to 30 degrees. We chose 125 panels because we found from previous reports that this amount was needed to power a 150m section of track. These angles were chosen because 10 degrees is the minimum angle to prevent buildup of dust and debris, and 30 degrees was the optimal angle we found for the solar panels for San Jose. The resulting array can be found below: Figure 1: Curved Solar Panel Array In addition to the array design, I also came up with a design for the mounting system that will allow the panels to be accessible from below. With the addition of creating a technician's pod that can ride along the existing trac...

For the first week of the summer Spartan Superway internship, we were separated into groups depending on what our interests in the internship were. I was assigned to the solar project, where we will be researching and designing the solar panels and how to mount them to the track. With the help of Nahom Tulu and Alberto Lopez , we plan on creating a curved canopy design that can be serviceable from inside the canopy rather than on top. We will also be researching the best parts that can be used for the best efficiency, durability, and aesthetics. Before we began our designs and research, we first read up on the reports from the past years working on the project. We focused on the research and calculations that they have done and looked into what we liked and what could be improved. Overall, we spent the most time on Eric Rosenfeld's final report from fall 2016. We found that he did a great job with the calculations for how much energy will be used and how many panels would be n...