Showcasing Talent

At the end of each fall and spring semester Penn State Altoona holds the Student Showcase, an event that gives students an opportunity to present their work to the local business community and the public. At the December Showcase Judges for the Pechter Business Plan Competition named five student groups who will be given the opportunity to work on their projects this semester. The final winner will be named at the Spring Showcase, to be held April 28, 2017, at the Devorris Downtown Center, with demonstrations at the Force Advanced Technology Center, Ivyside Campus.

For December’s Showcase a number of student projects featured solar energy. Here’s just a sample:

Did you ever find three things in your fridge and have to figure out how to make them into dinner? Sometimes the idea for a student project begins the same way: having the materials before knowing how to put them to good use. Senior EMET students Jeffrey Frank and Daniel Stewart had the good fortune to have access to some solar panels and needed to create a senior project with them. The answer: “Right now there is no renewable energy on campus,” Frank says, so the project goal was find a way to use some of those solar panels to change that.

In phase 1 of the project Frank and Stewart devised a tracking system so that the panels could follow the sun throughout the day (see poster). Locating the best place for the system was not easy. While the beauty of the Penn State Altoona campus lies in its mature trees, the environment is not conducive for solar panels that need to be directly exposed to the sun. Frank says, “The panels need to face true south so the only place we found was the north end of the Hawthorn parking lot.”

The panels had been manufactured for use in space at low orbit and cannot function in humidity so another part of the project was designing a sealed housing system for the panels. In phase 2, they will be installed in aluminum tubes inside concrete casings. As with other solar projects, any extra energy will be stored in batteries for later use.


In the twenty-first-century world, having access to a power source no matter where you are is almost obligatory. So what can a person do when not near an electrical outlet? Two electro-mechanical engineering technology (EMET) students, Robert Frank and Alex Steve, came up with a two-prong solution to that problem as their senior capstone project at Penn State Altoona: wind and sun.

The “Duel Utility Power Mechanism” was built to both harvest energy and store it. A turbine is used for wind and two solar panels for the sun; they can be operated simultaneously, says Frank. Two 12V batteries store any excess energy for later use. The entire unit weighs less than 300 pounds and can fit on the back of a pickup truck, which would be really convenient, for example, when researchers are out in the field and need a power source for a camera or other instruments.


For more information and pictures from the December Showcase, click here. And mark your calendar for the Spring Showcase, April 28, to watch and listen to students talk about their work.

 

 

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