Engineering Applications

Since my last presentation went pretty well, Ms. Garcia asked me to give another. I decided to stick with energy related topics with the hope of introducing a topic they may want to pursue as a career. This week’s presentation was about solar panels. I figured the students were already somewhat familiar with solar panels but hadn’t thought about how they could work with them.

The talk started with how solar panels work, the amount of energy they can produce, and the careers associated with them – but the students weren’t interested in the technology’s potential. A few students became interested when I showed a picture of different solar sculptures. The sculptures were colorful, multidimensional, multipurpose, and significantly different from the traditional black box solar panel. Then I pulled up a slide about flexible solar cells that had a picture of the Michigan Solar Car and suddenly most of the class was asking questions. The students were amazed that college students could build something that looked so cool. I was glad that I had visited the solar car booth at the last two design expos because it definitely helped me answer the different questions the students asked.

I had one last slide – something mildly related to solar panels that I had heard about at a conference a few years ago. I showed a picture of the Mars Rover and explained how it was designed to last only a couple of months. Its powered by a solar panel and since it was running so much longer than originally predicted the panel would get covered with dust and the rover would stop. Then after just a short time of being stopped, a windstorm would clean the solar panel off. I had thought this was amazing and the students not only thought it was interesting but a couple actually said that it was pretty cool. I asked them what they would do to fix the problem if they were building the next rover. One student suggested attaching fans to the corners of the solar panel so they could blow the dust off. Another wanted to make wind shield wipers to wipe the dust off. I was really impressed by their suggestions, especially since I’ve seen both of their suggestions presented at conferences as research projects.