Throughout the course of this project, there was a lot of decision making that drastically altered our approach to certain obstacles. In general, almost all decision making was first done at a team level with the mechanical engineering sub-team before the party ultimately responsible for the task made the final call. Thus far, there have been a handful of instances that stand out as more impactful decisions.
The dirt lot
Very early into the project, we relized that one of our proposed systems would significantly outperform any other system we planned to impliment, so much so that it would actually generate revenue for our assigned district. As our faculty mentor did not expect any of the teams to be able to turn a profit, but rather would be reducing the overall cost of power by supplimenting the distribution system with solar energy. However, our preliminary analysis showed that a PV system we designed for a multi-achre plot of land would actually generate a surplus of energy that the district could sell back to the power company. Thinking we would have an advantage in the competition if we could maximize this revenue, we decided to remove all other systems from our final design.
The cutting edge of energy storage
One of the largest design decisions we had to make was our battery selection. Being one of the most exspensive parts of any photovoltaic system, this was something we could not afford to get wrong. While lithium ion batteries are the current industry standard, they are still very expensive despite their commercial availability and are still extremely inefficient. After discussing with our faculty sponsor, we began researching alternative battery designs and discovered that saltwater batteries were not only commercially available, but incredibly optimized for PV systems and a lot less exspensive than we expected from an immerging technology. While there are some concerns with sizing and succeptability to environmental factors, all these drawbacks could be easily worked around.
Ammending a previous decision
Shortly after completing our first deliverable packet, we learned that the final deliverable included a creative implimentation of PV technology. Reading through our district's current development plan, we also learned that they wanted to showcase themselves as a green campus by displaying prominant PV technologies. While we had originally planned on ditching many of our smaller PV systems that were not financially viable, we realized that some of them met this need quite nicely, and that we could give the neccesary written justification for reimplimenting them in our final report. As such, we brought back designs including a solar shaded parking structure and solar Spanis tiling.