Heleotropic Project

At our next group meeting, we decided the we wanted our project to be programed to follow the sun, instead of tracking sunlight, in order to be more efficent. The reasoning behind this was that if we already know the suns travel path for everyday of the year (and every season) it would save more energy to just follow the known, never changing path of the sun than to program the machine to follow the light, which could become distracted by clouds and etc. We decided that we would cover all of the angles and distances that the machine needed to travel by putting tubes in two parallel planes where the top plane controlled movement in the y-axis direction and the bottom plane controlled the x-dircetion of movement. The two planes would move simultaneously to cover all of the angles needed. The next meeting we drew a diagram for the frame work and moving planes for our project and worked out all of the dimensions needed to build gears and that will allow us to reach all of our desired angles. Below shows our final sketch of our project.

After that meeting, we started building our final project by laser cutting acrylic to make the entire body, the frames. two planes, and the gears used to move the planes. The two flat planes where made by weaving metal wire through the acrylic frame so that the two planes had square grids on them, which were slightly misaligned. This was so that the tubes that would be collecting the sunlight could sit on the bottom grid and move freely. Our idea was that the tubes, for real use, would have fiber optic wires in them that would allow the collected sunlight to travel through the tubes and be focused onto a solar panel below. The wire mess second plane would allow for the wires to come out of the bottom of the tubes and the tubes would still be free moving. Images of the final built project are below. They show the top and bottom planes, the gear system with the servos used to move them attached, and the entire body of the project. The image quality is bad due to the fact that I took these on my phone.

Our group also made a Digital Project version of our idea, but enhanced the idea by making sure the tubes in the system never over shadowed each other. Meaning that as the tubes rotate and follow the sun, the tubes in the back row (farthest away from the sun) will actually be the tallest and the rows will decrease in height to make a flat plane that places the sun, thus eliminating shadows and optimizing light harvesting. Plus throughout the day the tubes will create a wave motion ontop of a building, or where ever the system is used. Our group wanted to use this system for urban projects, that's why we tried to bring a visual aspect to our project as well.