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Peter Coutts

This is Peter's Page!

Peter is a 5th year BS/MEng Mechanical Engineer at RIT's Kate Gleason College of Engineering.

The following is work that Peter has done towards this project.

Meeting Minutes

A chunk of Peter's work on this project has been taking meeting minutes at every meeting and design review so that the team has a detailed record of what has happened along the way. This will hopefully help out future Multidisciplinary Senior Design Teams who take up this project to improve upon it. After typing up the minutes the same day as the meeting, Peter sends emails out to the team detailing the 'Action Items' that were identified. These items are things that were discussed during the meeting that need to be taken care of to ensure our project is on track to success.

Link to Peter's Meeting Minutes:

Meeting Minutes

Solar Tracker Sub-System

Engineering Requirements

Solar Tracker Engineering Requirements

Feasibility

Solar Tracker Feasibility

Subject Matter Expert Review

Dr. Stevens:

• Thought it was an interesting concept
• Liked it better when he heard we did not have to design it ourselves
• Liked that it had been built and was operational
• Thought we should also look into other types of tracking as well

Solar Flower Tracking Mechanism

The selected tracking mechanism was directly taken from SolarFlower.org. The Solar Flower is an open-source project headed by Daniel Connell who has designed and built several different projects to solve everyday problems around the world in a sustainable way. Mr. Connell has been informed of our interest in his project and is looking forward to having us test out his designs with our modifications.

Design

Drawings were produced by Nathan Johnson but are shown below for conceptual reasons:

Box Trough

Wheel

Gearing

Risks

Solar Tracker Risks

Testing

Solar Tracker Testing Pocedures

Additional Information

YouTube Link to Solar Flower Tracking System in Operation

Trip to Haiti

Peter traveled to Borgne, Haiti from January 7th - January 18th 2015 with a team of students and professors from RIT

Outcomes of the Haiti Trip:

• Trough Prototype Testing
  • Built a 2 foot long version of our solar trough
  • Used our derived equation for the parabola
  • 1 inch inner diameter copper pipe with soldered cap on end
  • Boiled water in 45 minutes
    • Started at 10:30 AM
    • Demonstrated proof of concept
    • Rough construction gave many sources of error
      • Wrinkled mylar reflected solar insolation less effectively
      • Cardboard frame was not a perfect parabola
      • No greenhouse chamber was used to prevent natural convection around pipe
      • A 1 inch ID copper pipe was used instead of a 2 inch ID pipe
      • Angle of trough was produced from a protractor and roughly held with cardboard and tape
      • Trough was estimated to be pointing true South

YouTube Link to Haiti Prototype Steam Generation Video

Peter found out that the KGPB farmers in Haiti were excited about the concept of distilling oils from vetiver.

Besides testing the trough in Haiti, Peter was able to get a better understanding of the constraints involved with tools, skilled labor, and other resources.