Spartan Superway Internship

Week7:    Solar Roof Design This week, I continued finishing the rails. I also designed the solar roof frame mechanism, so that it can get most of the light.  By using the motion generation mechanism method, I was able to have the crank moving 180 degree.  Solar roof frame mechanism will be installed on the top of the half scale rails. Connection for stepping  motor.

Week 6: Fixing Rails For this week, my team and I finished fixing the upper rail. By applying the new method that we found from week 5, we were able to connect copper strips together quicker. As a result, collector shoes are able to slide smoothly on copper strips.

Week 5:  A Better Way to Connect Copper Strips & Solution for Collector Shoes Switcher Copper strips will be cut diagonally to prevent friction. A third piece of copper is placed under the two connected copper and screwed over to keep them stable. The design for the collector shoes switcher.  

Week 4: My goal for week4 was to fix the rails and to find out other ways to connect the copper strips together. In the previous idea, right copper strips were placed on the top of the left strips and they were connected together with screws. This idea worked pretty well with our current collector shoes; however, the only problem it had was the noise when the collect shoes ran over connection points, where two copper strips were connected. (Previous idea-Figure1 ) Other solutions that I could think of was to make the teeth shapes or to line up two copper strips and weld them together. I also did some research on different types of collector shoes, which uses graphite carbon. However, for the half scale, this would be a costly solution because we have to reinstall all the third rails and convert it into AC instead of DC.

Week 3:          A Better Way for the Half-Scale Collector Shoes This week, I focused more on designing part to improve the half-scale collector shoes. To keep the collector shoes running smoothly inside the two rails and to constantly provide enough energy for the pod-cars,  there were two things that half-scale collector shoes are needed to improve. Firstly, they  had to be in a constant contact  with the two copper strips, the main supplied energy. To solve this problem, I added two pieces  of coppers strips for each collector shoe. The purpose of adding two copper strips to  each  collector shoe  was to increase the contact area, so that the collector shoes always touched the copper trip while running. Secondly, the copper shoes were needed to reduce the friction while running on the two copper strips. The only way that my team could think of was to add the bending curve copper strips to  the gap in between two added copper pieces. So when the collector shoes hit any obstacle

Week2: Solutions for Wayside Power I did some research on how other public transportation's collector shoes work. There are two main models that are used in the industry, which are pantograph (transport) and third rail.  1)   Subway and trains          Most of modern trains have a third rail where it gets the electricity from. Usually, the collector shoes are located at the first and the end section of the train.     A third rail is installed laterally along with the railway track. A collector shoe touches the third rail while the subway or the train are running.  Pro: They can withstand extreme conditions: vibrations, heat, etc. 2) Pantographs ( pantograaf):                                (Schunk Current Collectors and Sling Contacts) The strip will run against the cables on the top of the rail while running. The top part is called intelligent carbon. Pros: long service life, easy maintenance and environment friendly product. *Comparison between