Work Night 3.21.19

Work Night

Date: 3.21.19
Location: Logan HS
Time: 5:00-7:00 PM
Students: Avery, Thaying, Thomas, Alex and Seth
Goal: Work on finalizing the energy storage system and test it.

With spring sports in full swing we have to start our work nights later to allow many of our team members to get their practice in before we have our meeting. It makes for some long days and late nights but we continue to move forward as we near our target date for completion.

Tonight we wanted to bench test our new energy storage unit. The old unit worked ok in our previous tests but we wanted to experiment with super capacitors. We have never used them before on a project and Mr. Foye (our electrical engineering consultant) suggested we give them a try. It took two weeks to design, build and test the circuit but it worked. Now we have to mount it on our limb tester to give it a walking test.

What we want to see is the unit store the electricity created by our generators and then slowly discharge it. You will see a video below that documents that charge dissipation. By storing more electricity we hope to power both the SmartPuck battery and our BlueTooth module. We met our goal earlier by generating enough energy to power the battery, now we just want to see if we can improve it to also power our wireless connection.

Next week will be the big test to see if it works with our limb tester.

Thomas worked on cleaning up some of our electrical sketches that were done on paper.

Paige and Alex documenting the testing of the storage circuit.

Image of the new storage unit being tested before we mount it. In our new configuration, we are using 22 milli Farad Super Caps and 7500 micro Farad electrolytic capacitors. All the probes you see are running to an oscilloscope. 

Alex soldering in the final connections on the storage unit.

Seth working on a new adapter for the shock absorber  for the production concept.

Bench test showing the slow discharge of the super cap storage system. The power supply is disengaged and the voltage will slowly discharge to zero.