Week 10: Food Team Wrap Up

Alas, this quarter has come to an end, and so has our project (in terms of planning, at least). Our team has submitted all its deliverables:
– A final report with two final she design recommendations (one primarily passive and the other primarily active)
– The computational models
– Revit models for the shed designs (just graphic representations of our design recommendations)

It was great giving our final presentation to the whole ESW group. Even though it went only for five minutes, it felt very fulfilling to reflect on our work over the past quarter and see how much we’ve accomplished. We sincerely appreciate all the support the Chife Foundation has given us, and hope they are satisfied with our design recommendations.

Even thought the planning stage of our project is over, our very own member, Misam, will be going to Anam over the summer to help with implementation. We’ll be sending him all the information he needs to know, along with a checklist of all the things he should look into while there. This project has truly been an incredible experience, and can’t wait to see it become a reality!

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Week 10: Water Team Summary

It’s a wrap! We just submitted our final deliverables: the Wastewater System Recommendation and the Water System Recommendation, plus accompanying Excel models, training manuals, and application files. We hope the Chife Foundation enjoys their reading material this weekend, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank the Chife Foundation for the generous assistance they have given us this quarter. Special thanks also goes out to the professors and graduate students who have taken the time to  advise us.

Over the summer, members of the water team will be available for consult. We’ll be forwarding the detailed instructions and manuals to Misam, as well as our summer contact info.

Solar Week 10: Wrap Up

This week was crunch time for us.  We were able to finish construction on the updated kiosk design and get all of the wiring to work before our presentation on Wednesday.  This was quite a feat given the difficulties that we had with getting the USB ports to work.  In addition to helping with the final touches on the cart, I did some refinements to the financial model as well.  I created base case, best case, and worst case scenarios for each assumption and created dropdown menus that allow the user to choose which case they would like to model for each assumption.  I also created a tornado diagram to allow the Chife Foundation to quickly identify how variation in each assumption affects the final NPV of the kiosk.

Tornado Diagram

I am still perplexed by the demand assumptions that the Chife Foundation gave to us.  Given the high usage of electricity, the households with the demand profile suggested by the Chife Foundation must currently be using a diesel generator.  My impression is that this cart is designed to serve those without current access to electricity and that cannot afford a diesel generator.  I did, however, decide to increase the demand assumptions for the base case significantly since the initial demand assumptions seemed too low.  Due to the increased demand, it is now optimal for each kiosk to have 2 solar carts and we decided to increase the battery size for rental batteries from 7Ah to 12Ah.  With the 7Ah, users were going to have to charge more than once per day.  With the 12Ah batteries, users can charge a little less than once per day.

My tasks for this weekend are to find out how to ship the cart to Nigeria and update the business model for the report.

Food Storage: Week 10

This final week we spent our time finishing sections of our final report and polishing up our deliverables. Using revit we threw together concept models that can be used to help members of the chife foundation visualize the types of storage sheds that we envision. Below are images of our primarily passive and active cooling shed concpets.

primarily passive shed

Active Cooling Shed

We also worked on creating a presentation for the ESW showcase. This was a time where members of all of Stanford ESW’s teams came together to share thier work for the quarter.  Each team was only given 5 mins to present thier work which was somewhat of a time crunch, but we were able to touch many of the main aspects of our work

All in all I believe we have put together a solid list of recommendations for the Chife Foundation. With a little further design work, such as structural analysis and sourcing materials, year round yam availibility thanks to improved storage may become a reality in Anam. We look forward to the work that Misam will perform over the summer and to the possibility of continuing to assist the Chife Foundation in the development of the Anam Region.

last week

This week was very stressful but we managed to get a lot done for the project. We finished the prototype with the added USB ports and the cover for the electrical components. I also finished the SketchUp design of our new and improved cart as seen in the figure.

We also gave our presentation this week. It was only 5 minutes long and it was difficult to limit ourselves to speak of only the essentials about our project. The presentation went very well and I think everyone appreciated the fact we had a prototype and our song to match.

This week we are concentrating on finishing the manuscript and the guides, as well as figuring out how to ship our prototype to Nigeria. We also are looking into finding a new way to hole the cart up. As was seen in the presentation, the legs are not very sturdy and the cart easily falls forward or back. We have been thinking of adding foot like structures to the ends of the legs to give it more support. We are also looking at how to optimize the tilting mechanism so that it can be held stable at a certain degree.

Week 10: Wrap up

Work for this week focused on preparing for our final presentation and final report.

Presentation

We gave our final presentation this past Wednesday. It was a challenge to present a quarter worth’s of work within 5 minutes, but we have successfully did so. We presented the background regarding yam and food storage problems, our objectives for the quarter, our evaluation of decisions, examples of the computational models and prototypes, and finally our design recommendations that covered our new revit shed models (thanks to Nelson work).

Final Report

The remainder of the week has been focused proofreading and editing our final report. It’s been a good challenge to document our process idea to our decision matrix. At this point, everyone in our team is reading and editing each other sections to ensure unity of thought and clear explanation of ideas. On a separate note, we will be creating a list of todos before Misam departs to Anam.

Overall, it has been an exciting project to work and see the end products of our work thus far.

Week 10: Food Storage

This week we mostly worked on finishing the final report and preparing for our presentation.

I was responsible for the background part of the report, so I wrote about New Anam City, yams in Nigeria, current issues with storage in Anam, and the ideal yam storage conditions. I realized that some things in our prior research conflicted with each other, so I had to conduct more research and check from reliable resources to ensure all facts are consistent.

We also worked on finalizing the presentation. I suggested minimizing the words in our presentation and making it heavily visual, but we agreed as a group that for information to be conveyed clearly we should have notes on the slides. The presentation on Wednesday went really well and our effort paid off. I talked about the background for the project and introduced one of the shed design recommendations.

Working on these tasks was great. It helped us look back at our quarter-long project and reflect on how this winded process resulted with a great achievement. It was nice to see how the work of a small team, and dividing the work of a huge project to small pieces, then doing each one at a time, would result in such great accomplishment. I had an incredible time working with the team, and learned a great deal. Cannot wait to see how the shed will look in reality!

Week 10: Food Storage

This past week, members of our group worked on 3 things: finishing our Revit models, completing the report and making the final presentation for the quarter.

Presentation

As a group we met a couple of times during the week to work on our presentation. Since we couldn’t put everything we had worked on during the quarter into the presentation, we had to be very selective at what we were going to talk about. As such, we decided that since we only have 5 minutes to talk, we would broadly talk about 5 main topics to do with our work: 1. Background of the Problem 2. Objectives of our Project 3. Computational Models Developed 4. Prototypes Tested and 5. Design Recommendations to Chife. Each of us talked about a specific topic and our intent was to summarize the essence of the main ideas under each topic so as to be able to present it in a minute or so.

Revit

The Revit models that we had made earlier had to be updated so as to include the piping and lighting systems, windows and vents, and chimneys and skylights. Nelson worked on completing these on Revit and made them look very presentable and professional. He also threw in the yam storage racks that we had recommended in each of the compartments within the shed.

Final Report

Some aspects of our final report needed some work in the past week as well. I personally, had to do some finishing write-up work for the ‘Experimental Results’ section and also had to write the ‘Executive Summary’ for the report. Once I am done with it, our group will go through it and make possible amends to it as necessary before we edit and format everything into one concrete document before turning it in for our final submission.

Road Ahead

As for myself, there is going to be a lot more of yams for me in the days to come, as I will hopefully be interning with them over the summer. I am currently working on getting my visa application in place to get the Nigerian visa before I leave the US. The packing list to Anam does look both, long and intimidating. Nonetheless, it will be a fun experience and I am looking forward to it (with sufficient amounts of bug sprays and insect repellents in my baggage).

Solar Week 10 – wrap up

This week we gave our final presentation and saw the presentations of all the other groups.   It was wonderful to see everyone’s work, and I think the interns in each place this summer will have lots of interesting things to do. I think our presentation went well except that we only had five minutes and could have filled 15 easily, and our cart proved much more time-consuming to put back together than we thought so naturally it fell over in front of everyone because we had not yet finished the stand. Despite that, I had spent many hours this week connecting my eight USBs to the positive and negative buses (so difficult with thicker wires) and Maneeshika and I figured out how to attach them to be accessible on the side of the cart–which also was a pretty big hassle with our resources at hand. I have also been compiling our report to go with the documents assigned to the other group members.

It was a very interesting experience having a student-run, project-based class which is something I haven’t been a part of before. I genuinely think our project has a lot of potential to be utilized in a big capacity by the Chife Foundation, but I’ll have to wait and see what ends up happening.

Here is our cart ready for presentation with the USB ports, BBOXX, and devices to demonstrate powering.

Thanks to our project leader Andrew, class leader Nick, and ESW!

Week 10: Rainwater System

We gave our final presentation today and now we really are at the final stretch. That’s not to say we’re done with all our work; the final report, which I think we’ve been hacking away at for over a month now, is due Saturday and we have quite a bit of revision to do. While I’m glad we had a chance to talk to the Chife Foundation last week, the news was not good for our report progress. Since speaking with DK, Kyle and I have been furiously adding new rainwater systems for the three house plans, researching water quality test kits, and fiddling with GPS and EPANET models.

Rainwater Harvesting System for Proposed Compound House. With our Excel model, we have determined the optimal catchment area (meaning the guttered portion of the roof) and storage tank size for the three house plans we were sent. Due to the indoor plumbing and second-floor bathrooms, we’ll have to install a pump for each home. The specific design of each house’s pump system is something we’d recommend for ESW to pursue next year. (Drawing by Marisa Landicho)

There are still some nebulous portions of our recommendation, in particular how the potable borehole water network and the individual rainwater catchment systems will coexist. With more time we would be able to make a more solid recommendation but as it is, we’re just trying to identify as many of the issues as we can.

Tomorrow, I’ll be finishing up the last of our “field work” per se. Andrew purchased a Garmin handheld GPS unit for Misam to do the surveying work this summer. I need to check how consistent the elevation measurements are, which will involve me doing an impromptu survey of the Science and Engineering Quad. I’ve been trained in formal surveying (tripod and level and all) so this will be a fun practice exercise. My findings will then be going into our intern-training section of the report. Onwards to victory.