Week 2 Activity - Help out at SIEW 2016 & PVSEC 26 Exhibitions

At the Singapore International Energy Week (SIEW) Exhibition...

There were a few booths around us, with all the polytechnics and ITE, NTU, SiT, and SUTD having their own booths. We found two notable groups which may be relevant to the Solar Car, else the course of study, Diploma in Energy Systems & Management (DESM) . 

The first one's from Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) group, which was doing an Intelligent Building Energy Management System (IBEMS), which allows automatic switching of certain equipment such as fan or aircon, according to the temperature. It also automatically slows down certain equipment with the use of variable speed drive (VSD) to reduce energy usage, when exceeding a certain percentage (e.g 80%) of the maximum quoted energy usage a building should use, hence avoiding the surpass of maximum limit and additional charges.

Figure 1: NYP IBEMS System

The second one's from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) group which was doing a 3-D printed Electric Vehicle (EV). One of the students in the NTU team was from SP and worked for the SunSPec 2 and 3, and they have kindly shared with us information on building the car. Their car works similarly to SunSPec 4, with lesser budget and only plans to enter the Shell-Eco-Marathon. The speed sensor for SunSPec 4 did not work, hence we went to understand how did their EV's speed sensor work. We were told that they used rotary encoders from OMRON at the cost of around $S10.

Figure 2: NTU's 3D Printed EV - Venture VII

It is understood that the way it works is similar to what the SunSPec 4's speed sensor works. Instead of receiving pulses from the motor controller, there is a belt connected to the wheel, and for every RPM, some pulses are generated and sent to the Arduino. We were also told that we should check out what are the pulses produced from the 3 phases of our motor, whereby from there, we can work out on the programming for the speed sensor. We were also told that their speed sensor was relatively accurate. We have learned a lot from them and are grateful for their kind help. 

At the Photovoltaic Science and Engineering Conference (PVSEC 26)...

There were several professionals from overseas attending the conference, with some of them stopping by our booth to ask more on the SunSPec 4. Most of them were from research labs of universities, companies, such as Australia, Japan, the States, and other European countries. The SunSPec 4 has received many praises, with most of them being impressed by the high efficiency of the solar panels (24%). Even representatives from local organizations such as Singapore Power and Housing and Development Board has stopped by our booth.

Figure 3: Answering questions regarding SunSPec 4

One area of attention brought up by one of the visitors was the safety of the car. He was concerned about the grounding issue of the car, and that should there be any misfortunate leakage of electricity and comes into contact with the conductive parts of the car, the driver and passenger might be electrocuted. 

A suggestion for improvement from another visitor was an automatic self-cleaning feature of the solar panels such that dust will not be stuck onto the cells and prove a nuisance.