15 April 2020

The team is discussing ethics.  The group will begin working on the final report and the presentation. 

April 6,2020

April 6,2020

This week, we focus on our scaling our system based on the updated parameters due to shelter in place order. The updated power requirement has increased the power required to 350 kW.
To account for this power, we increase our lithium-ion battery and supercapacitor pack. The supercapacitor pack is sized to 16 series - 4 parallel configurations. Meanwhile, the lithium-ion battery is sized to 8 modules of 6 series - 35 parallel configurations.

The PCB design has been finalized and will be uploaded to the google drive for future team use. Since fabrication is not possible this semester, we hope the future teams can continue our work.
Over the next few days, we will maximize our effort to build a larger power module in SolidWorks to house all the new components. Today, we also present our progress to the rest of the team and our advisor. The presentation can be seen below.

Presentation 2 from Steven Goh

11 March 2020

The team met in the ME106 lab, E125, to gain access to a power supply and multimeter.  One of the group members has a current sensor, and we created a circuit with a dummy load to see how the current sensor functioned.  Permission to gain access to E125 will be looked into, as this lab has the necessary equipment the team will need. 

The design for the PCB is almost complete and can soon be sent to fabrications shops. We are looking to get a quote to see how much the fabrication will cost from a couple local PCB fabrication companies, TTI Technologies, and Phase 3 Technologies. 

26 February 2020

An alternative design for the PCB was created.  The PCB design files will need to be created on a different computer than on one of the student's because the version does not support the design of a board larger than 26mm x 17mm. 

The primary assignment this week was preparing the presentation. 

A spot welder for the battery pack is being searched for, or where the team can gain access to one. 

29 Febuary 2020

This week, we recieved our litihum ion batteries and start building our cutom battery pack. The next step is to spot weld the batteries into the desirable configuration then start looking into wats to safely charge the battery pack. We were able to determine the open lab time for ME41 lab so we will be meeting there sometime this week to complete the custom battery pack done. We also spent today charging up some of the old universal batteries we had in the facility which we might use to help change our custom battery pack. We will make sure it is safe before using.

5 February 2020

Today we spent the majority of today looking for all the parts we need to build our power module. We were able to find a box for the housing of the power module on McMaster that will greatly reduce the overall cost of our project. We also went over the simulations we created last semester to double check all the equations to ensure everything was correct. We also started researching on the different switches we will be using on the power module to gain a better understanding on the fundamental functions of the components that will be making up the power module. All of this research will be used for our next presentation.

29 January 2020

The team met with Ron Swenson, Eric Hagstrom, and Dr. Furman to give an update on the status of the team's progress on the project.  Today, the power module from the previous year was disassembled.  The supercapacitors that are required for this year's design were taken out and set aside.  The polarity of the supercapacitors was verified, as they were not specified on the datasheet, for BCAP0350 E270 T11.  Now that the polarity is known, further progress on the design for the PCB can continue.