Final Presentation

Description

Presentations of the projects are given a few days after the Final Demo to an audience of fellow student reviewers, the lab instructors, and occasionally faculty or even students from outside the class who are following up a project of personal interest to them. The style is formal and professional, and students should dress accordingly (Generally business professional, or what you would wear to a career fair).

Requirements and Grading

Each project team has 25 minutes for a Powerpoint presentation and questions. Every group member must present their own work contributing to the project and be ready to answer questions. Presentations are judged on the basis of presentation technique and of technical organization and content.

Presentation technique includes dress, use of display materials (slides), clarity of speech, absence of filler words/fidgeting, proper eye contact with audience and smooth transitions between speakers. Content is judged on use of a proper introduction, orderly and connected development of ideas, absence of unnecessary details, proper pacing to stay within the allotted time, and an adequate summary at the close of the talk. Quantitative results are expected whenever applicable. Here is a general outline to follow:

  1. Introduction to your team and your project.
  2. Objective. What problem are you solving?
  3. Brief review of original design, statement on areas of design that changed, and overview of each functional block's requirements.
  4. Description of project build and functional test results. You can choose to include a short (30s) video of your project here.
  5. Discussion of successes and challenges, as well as explanations of any failed verifications demonstrating and understanding of the engineering reason behind the failure
  6. Conclusions from the project: what did you learn, what would you do differently if you redesigned your project, etc.
  7. Recommendations for further work.

Any significant, relevant ethical issues should be briefly addressed, preferably in a single slide.

Presentations will be graded using the presentation grading rubric. Your slides should follow ECE or College of Engineering presentation theming.

Submission and Deadlines

Slides for your final presentation must be uploaded to your project page on PACE prior to your presentation time. Deadlines for signing up may be found on the Calendar. Sign-up for the final presentation is done through PACE. Remember to sign up for a peer review of another group.

El Durazno Wind Turbine Project

Alexander Hardiek, Saanil Joshi, Ganpath Karl

El Durazno Wind Turbine Project

Featured Project

Partners: Alexander Hardiek (ahardi6), Saanil Joshi (stjoshi2), and Ganpath Karl (gkarl2)

Project Description: We have decided to innovate a low cost wind turbine to help the villagers of El Durazno in Guatemala access water from mountains, based on the pitch of Prof. Ann Witmer.

Problem: There is currently no water distribution system in place for the villagers to gain access to water. They have to travel my foot over larger distances on mountainous terrain to fetch water. For this reason, it would be better if water could be pumped to a containment tank closer to the village and hopefully distributed with the help of a gravity flow system.

There is an electrical grid system present, however, it is too expensive for the villagers to use. Therefore, we need a cheap renewable energy solution to the problem. Solar energy is not possible as the mountain does not receive enough solar energy to power a motor. Wind energy is a good alternative as the wind speeds and high and since it is a mountain, there is no hindrance to the wind flow.

Solution Overview: We are solving the power generation challenge created by a mismatch between the speed of the wind and the necessary rotational speed required to produce power by the turbine’s generator. We have access to several used car parts, allowing us to salvage or modify different induction motors and gears to make the system work.

We have two approaches we are taking. One method is converting the induction motor to a generator by removing the need of an initial battery input and using the magnetic field created by the magnets. The other method is to rewire the stator so the motor can spin at the necessary rpm.

Subsystems: Our system components are split into two categories: Mechanical and Electrical. All mechanical components came from a used Toyota car such as the wheel hub cap, serpentine belt, car body blade, wheel hub, torsion rod. These components help us covert wind energy into mechanical energy and are already built and ready. Meanwhile, the electrical components are available in the car such as the alternator (induction motor) and are designed by us such as the power electronics (AC/DC converters). We will use capacitors, diodes, relays, resistors and integrated circuits on our printed circuit boards to develop the power electronics. Our electrical components convert the mechanical energy in the turbine into electrical energy available to the residents.

Criterion for success: Our project will be successful when we can successfully convert the available wind energy from our meteorological data into electricity at a low cost from reusable parts available to the residents of El Durazno. In the future, their residents will prototype several versions of our turbine to pump water from the mountains.