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The Sun. 93 million miles from earth
and it is still the basis of all forms of life. The STEP senior
design teams at Valparaiso University have been working hard to implement and perfect
a way of capturing its abundant and reusable energy. We're going to show you
some of the highlights or our work and research during this past
2009-2010 school year.
(Mean To Live - Switchfoot)
The purpose of the solar thermal electrolysis project is to
investigate producing zinc from zinc-oxide using solar energy.
Current zinc production processes use a lot of fossil fuels as their heat source
and we'd like to substitute the solar energy for the fossil fuels in order to make the process
more sustainable.
more sustainable.
This is the swept sine measurement system for the STEP team.
This is what's used to measure the impedance of the electrolyte
during the electrolysis process. This number is important
to us because it tells us how efficient out process is
when we are actually creating zinc.
The different teams that have come before us
have used an older system. We have updated the system. There was a problem with
charge build up across the electrodes in the previous systems,
so what we've done is actually included a charge cancelling program
to eliminate that charge, so that when we take the swept sine measurement
we get acurate number back.
One of the problems we've encountered in past experiments is corrosion of various
parts of the reactor including the crucibles, electrode sheaths,
and chimneys. One of our goals for this year was to try
and prevent that from happening. The various solutions we came up with
were to produce a cup from molybdenum foil
to line the crucible with. We know this works because it
has been used in past experiments and it doesn't get corroded.
To protect the chimneys,
we decided to go from a mullide chimney to a silicon-carbide chimney
because it will be more resistant to the chemical attack.
And finally, to protect the electrode sheaths, we purchased a
silicon-carbide past that we will coat the original mullide sheaths with
in order to protect them from chemical attack.
Last summer in Switzerland, the STEP team encountered a couple problems with the front window.
There was some buildup that was caused by the gases carrying particulate to the front
window and contaminating it. This limits the amount of radiation that could make it
into the reactor, which is a huge problem.
This year, we designed a gas flow provention system. As you can see here,
it comes up in contact with the front of the plate, so we will
hopefully shut down that gas flow problem. We went into some extensive
analysis of this to make sure this that this would not compromise
the integrity of the reactor temperature wise. As you can see here,
the front plate remains within a reasonable temperature range and we are very certain
that this will be successful.
Imagine this object, covered in mirrors reflecting the sun
into a reactor. That's what a heliostat does. The VU STEP team
has been working on the heliostat right here.
It is a quarterscale model of the heliostat that will be put on campus behind Gellersen.
We are going to use discrete tracking to track
the sun, and it will be reflecting copius amounts of light into our reactor.
In order to track the sun using the heliostat, we need to develop a program using
LABView in order to pull in the sun's position
from MATLAB and tell the heliostat where to go.
Currently, we are using LABView in order to
find the intertia of the heliostat system.
This program sends a sine wave to the drive board
and reads in the current and position of
the heliostat.
Swept sine wakes up in the morning, takes a deep yawn,
and says, "Ready for the day of swept sine." It gets out of bed
and makes itself breakfast...
(squeek)
"ZOMG THERE'S SWEPT SINE EVERYWHERE!!!!1!@@!!!!!"