October 7th-9th: A Weekend of Atonement, Football and Smart Surfaces

The weekend of October 7-9 was a hectic one to say the least. It started with my parents picking me up directly from work to go to dinner for Yom Kippur - the holiest day of the Jewish calendar where we pray for forgiveness and atone for our sins. Like all Jewish holidays; the day begins at sundown so immediately after dinner we went to services. Yom kippur is a particularly interesting holiday in that many Jews will fast from sundown to sundown as a means of allowing for more personal reflection. After a long (and malnourished) Saturday of prayer my family went into Detroit to visit my grandparents and enjoy the long awaited breaking of the fast. We had our usual bagels and lox and settled in to watch the Michigan vs. Northwestern football game. Denard dazzled in the second half and Michigan pulled away 42-24. Unfortunately, since the game didn't start until 7:00 I didn't get home close to midnight (16 straight hours of on the go!). It was a long and tiring day - one that was certainly mentally draining enough to want to rest up Sunday, but there were other plans in store. After completing various other tasks all morning (a homework set and some exam prep) I caught the bus up to North to meet with my Smart Surfaces group for the first time since we had been formed. It was an exciting feeling knowing I had an official group and we all wouldn't be changing projects come Tuesday, but it also meant that we needed to get our act together as we started to plan out the rest of our semester. We had a great meeting where we discussed team goals, desires, and rules. I put together the basis of our powerpoint and everyone took a crack at spicing it up with colors and figures. I'm quite excited to work with this group the remainder of the year as we pulled it all together for a crisp looking presentation.

More is to come on our team roles soon!

Working Prototype Video

Just wanted to toss up a more finalized working video of the solar hot water heater prototype. The sound is a little low so I'll walk everyone through the four stages:
1. Sun rises in East - East panel opens, West opens slightly to reflect
2. Sun is high overhead - Both panels open
3. Sun sets in West - East panel closes slightly to reflect, West opens fully
4. Nightfall - E & W panels close up to secure the system and a light show at dusk ensues (Blinking blue LED in video)

We then take a peak inside the system to reveal the black tubing which holds the glycol and heats up through solar energy absorption.

Enjoy:

p.s. - it was a shame the working model couldn't be demonstrated live at the powerhouse. My thought was that the solar panel didn't generate enough power in that low lighting to power all the components.

Solar Hot Water Model

From Sunday 10/2:
I am very excited to get the model built for the solar water heating system. I just finished the coding and using the small servos (extended with pens) I was able to show the pieces opening and closing when they should be. When added to the model it will look great.
Video? Video:

Looking forward to assembly with my team tomorrow!

Power House Visit

So we visited the powerhouse and showcased what we had been working on all week. Unfortunately our model didn't work as well as it had been before, but the video we showed still seem to portray what we were thinking. We got some great feedback about the high structure and repeatability of the design as a negative and should consider really going for the wow factor. The house was not quite what I was expecting as everything is unstructured and the powerhouse loves novel ideas. At least the problem we received was open ended, leaving for plenty of room for innovation. I really like the solar hot water heating design and would like to continue with that moving forward. One thought would be to change the dimensions for each of the modules so its not so square and repeatable. When each one changes with the sun the array would look like a family (some fat, some tall) all rotating at the same time in a synchronized way.

Light Pipes - Week in review

After being placed on the seasonal/light/rotating team I was a little conflicted. While I wasn't too ecstatic about our constraints or the current state of the project there was something that captured my attention. For the first time in Smart Surfaces there was a high value problem worth tackling: security. Specifically, an issue that was brought up in class was that the solar panels were being taken from the roof of the power house. If the panels are gone there is no way to generate electricity and the house won't function. We toyed with a number of ideas and one solution was to place the panels indoors and pipe the light to them using fiber optic cable. Max was kind enough to let me borrow a cable and a few prisms to work on concentrating the light. 

Optic cables are so cool!

The one I was able to borrow was a singular fiber much thicker in diameter. But all optics functions the same way; the lights enters and keeps getting reflected internally until it reaches the other end and transmits out. Depending on how much you are willing to shell out the efficiencies can be anywhere from 70-99+ %. Using the borrowed cable I built a "black box" (though cardboard and not at all black) which contains a solar cell closed off from the light with the exception of what's provided by the optical cable. The solar cell is hooked up to an LED and if enough light is concentrated into the exposed end of the cable then the light will be powered. 

 

I was having a little trouble concentrating the light directly into the fiber before I had an idea. I looking into building a concentrator out of mirrors but the complexity of the project would have been too time consuming. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flashlight... As I've learned in this class why create when you can borrow. I took apart the flashlight and used the mirrors inside to direct enough white light into the cable and power the LED. Don't worry, I put the flashlight back together and it still works! It was a crazy week with a lot of outside the box (no pun intended! :) thinking but my proof of concept functioned and my team progressed the idea forward. Another successful week in Smart Surfaces, with a trip to the botanical gardens (and pictures!) to come.

Crossing Boundaries

An interesting concept was mentioned this week in class. In the U.S. we think of a boundary as a line where things end, something that you don't want to cross. In basketball or soccer if you go out of bounds you are penalized by giving the ball to the other team. However, in Greek the definition of a boundary is a beginning. Instead of thinking of crossing boundaries as stepping out of your comfort zone, it can be thought of as stepping into a realm of knowledge to be gained. This week I really tried to consider that concept and focus not so much on the engineering side of things but more on the aesthetics and end result of the product. It was certainly a new way to approach the project and one I very much enjoyed. I didn't focus solely on finding the cheapest, strongest materials - they also had to look good and mesh with the overall design. I enjoyed this fresh perspective and will certainly consider boundaries to be more fluid and crossable in the future.

Imitation Is The Highest Form Of Flattery

Week 2 started off with a bit of a surprise for me. I was expecting to completely switch gears and jump into a new project but I was assigned to stick with the water/hourly/folding project. The direction of it seemed to be heading towards a dead end but the new set of people really reenergized the project and were able to shed some light on areas of improvement. The excess water use turned into a garden, which became the surface, and eventually turned into a green wall. After a lengthy, and sometimes intense, discussion there was a concept which emerged and really caught my attention: biomimicry. Imitating tried and true methods from nature could save us the trouble of having to start from scratch. I looked for cool examples of nature interacting with water and two things caught my eye - the Lotus Effect and the Stenocara Beetle from the Namib Desert in Africa. This beetle is able to survive in one of the most arid landscapes in the world with its unique shape. Its bumpy back allows dew to condense on it and a waxy coating sends the droplets down the troughs to its mouth.

This waxy coating is quite similar to the Lotus effect and got me thinking about superhydrophobic materials. With such a small amount of the water actually touching the surface, water flows much more freely. 

Combine these principles with a few wisely placed gates and you can allow or restrict the flow of water all over the surface. When you're making a green wall, the amount of water each plant is getting can be quite critical. Over do it and they drown, under do it and they won't grow, so smartly delivering the water can optimize the crop yield. The issue of folding still prevented me from using this as inspiration for the surface, however when you use the geological definition of folding: when one or a stack of originally flat or planar surfaces are bent or curved as a result of deformation, the project opened up to numerous possibilities. I set off to work to learn Maya or some other 3D modeling software but the time investment was going to be too much to model this complex of a surface so quickly. I did learn that the fluid modeling package with it is quite extensive and could be useful in the future if we go that direction. Since my group is meeting later tonight to discuss ideas a rough prototype should suffice. A little bit of chip board and duct tape can do pretty much anything:

Why reinvent the wheel when nature has already done so? After all, imitation is the highest form of flattery.