Maze solving Robot

We have discussed many projects in Robotics before including Line Follower Robot. Maze Solving Robot is similar project but before we discuss about this project, we should know about maze and our objective.

What is Maze?

Maze is a type of puzzle with start start and end points including many dead ends.To solve this puzzle we need to find right path in a fastest possible way.

What type of maze we are going to use for our robot?

Usually, this project requires line maze which is black line on a white background.

Our Objective:

We will build a robot which can find its way in a line maze from start point to end point.

Basic Requirements:

Two Motors: Motors will move robot forward(Both motors running) and help it turns towards left(left motor slow and right fast) or right( right motor slow and left fast).

Five Infrared Sensors: Sensors helps robot to find its path and keeps it updated about the line on the floor.With five sensors their are 32 combination possible but many of them are unlikely to occur in our experiment.For ex. 11111(All indicating black) will never occur because their is only one line and this pattern is showing that line on both side of robot including line on which it is moving.

Download

Today we will learn how to create a simple discussion forum using PHP and MYSQL. This project is big and can't be covered in single post,so I would divide it into four different posts. Today we will discuss about how we can create skeleton of this project.Next week, we will see how we can use advance features such as jquery,ajax,functions and classes with this project.

File Structure:

We will create five files in root folder and one file db.php (Database configuration file) inside config folder.
index.php : This is home_page or our site from where user can sign in
sign_up.php: Its for new users registration
discuss.php: Post topics
reply.php : Post replies
log_out.php:log out user

Tools: Apache, PHP and Mysql (Download Xampp or WAMP)

What we are trying to do?

When we think about discussion forum, we know that we will need one login system and only registered can post and reply inside the forum.So, we will create three pages just for user login and they are index.php(login form), sign_up.php(for registering new users) and log_out.php(to remove session).

Other two pages will be used for discussion;first for submitting topic and other one will be used for replying.

Cooling towers are heat removal devices that are used to transfer heat from cooling water to the atmosphere.

What does a cooling tower do?

1)They promote efficient water uses
2)Prevents environmental damages

Hydraulic Regenerative Braking System

Regenerative Braking:
How regenerative braking Works?
More about this braking

Relative PDF :
The regenerative braking system for bicycle
Development of Regenerative braking system using supercapacitors for electrical vehicle
Hybrid RBS Presentation
Algorithm for these types of brakes

Jaipur leg Improvements

In developing countries where people can't afford artificial legs, Jaipur foot is just like a miracle. I hope you have heard about Jaipur Foot. If not you can read about it here. The Jaipur Leg is a rubber-based prosthetic leg for people with below-knee amputations, produced under the guidance of Dr. P. K. Sethi by Masterji Ram Chander in 1969. The Jaipur Foot is easy to manufacture prosthetic foot that gives patients the ability to do many things that they could do with an actual foot (running, climbing, etc). It has been an extraordinary achievement for a country like India where more than 30 percent of the population still earns less than 1 dollar a day. It costs around $45 and more than 17000 get this leg every year.

Our Objective:

Though NGO who build Jaipur's foot is doing extraordinary research work to improve Jaipur's foot still there is a large scope for improvement.

As every year passes, the concern over waste increases steadily. Based on incomplete reports from its parties, the Basel Convention estimated 338 million tonnes of waste was generated in 2001. Though above-mentioned estimate is not officially correct it gives us an idea that how much waste we produce each year.

We all know about conditions near the waste sites and dumps, due to these difficult conditions, it is not always possible for humans to do all tasks(collection, transport, processing or disposal, managing and monitoring of waste materials ) involved in Waste Management.

Joystick control car drive mechanism for physically challenged people

We often see that persons with a disability need to use mobility car. Mobility Car is a vehicle issued to a disabled person, to allow them to travel without the burden of their disability. Mobility cars are obtained from a scheme called "Motability". But this car too not come with some preconditions and these conditions are difficult to meet for severely disabled people. Moreover, driving a car is always difficult for a person with having control distributed all over.

This project is for engineering students and would be extremely useful for people who impair their physical abilities

Our objective:
We want to build a car that can be operated by using a joystick. If we can build that, it would be a great help for disabled persons.

Why we need this type of system?

The existing system in the market is modified to allow the physically disabled to drive but it still needs lots of improvements.

Scientists around the world are working towards the goal of developing technologies to harness energy from the sun to produce fuels for transport, industry and electricity generation. Fuels produced using solar energy would transform our future energy options by providing an alternative to fossil fuels. Solar energy, radiant light, and heat from the sun have been harnessed by humans since ancient times using a range of ever-evolving technologies. Solar energy technologies include solar heating, solar photovoltaics, solar thermal electricity and solar architecture, which can make considerable contributions to solving some of the most urgent problems the world now faces. We all know about the ever-growing energy needs of our world.

If we can use it to produce fuel, it would be a milestone for us and for our future generation. Many types of research around the world are working on this project.

Solar Powered automatic rain operated wiper

We have discussed many projects related to solar energy and we are going to discuss many more in the next few months. In this post, we will see how we can use sunlight in an automobile.

Though this project has been implemented by many companies, it would be great to build one for yourself in a lab or as your final year project. When I was thinking about this project, I thought it would be great if we can build it as an extension of rain sensor wipers project idea.

It is very easy to build and needs very few components. Rain Operated Motor consists of a conduction sensor(Tough Sensor) circuit, Control Unit, Wiper Motor, and Glass Frame.

Pedal Powered Juicer Grinder

A juicer is a tool for separating juice from fruits, herbs, leafy greens and other types of vegetables from its pulp in a process called juicing. In separating the pulp, juicers concentrate the nutrition naturally present in fruits and vegetables and allow the body to more easily absorb the nutrition than digesting the solid produce. The use of juicers also makes it easier to consume more raw produce.

Electric Juicer is a very common part of our life. But, do you know how much electricity we consume while juicing! if we start using pedal-powered juicers, we will not only save a large amount of electricity but our body would get some exercise too.

This project idea is for mechanical and physics students.

Ruby on Rails(ROR) was first introduced by David Hansson when he was working on the basecamp project. ROR is basically a framework developed in Ruby language. It makes website development interesting and very easy.

It works on two concepts -

1)Convention over configuration - It's a software design paradigm
to gain simplicity
2)Don't repeat yourself - Same code is not repeated twice anywhere in the program

Though the flexibility of programing is compromised the programmer gets a speedy decision making advantage and also saves himself from future problems.

David Heinemeier Hansson extracted Ruby on Rails from his work on Basecamp, a project management tool by 37signals (now a web application company). Hansson first released Rails as open source in July 2004 but did not share commit rights to the project until February 2005. In August 2006, the framework reached a milestone when Apple announced that it would ship Ruby on Rails with Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard", which was released in October 2007.

BCA (Bachelor of Computer Application) is an undergraduate degree course in India. With the boom of the IT industry, it has become one of the most sought after graduate degree courses. Full-time BCA programs normally take three academic years. The course usually consists of programming languages, mathematics, algorithms, data structures, networking, etc. Though you can do a project on any of the above topics, still, here I am suggesting project ideas related to programming languages.

C :

You can do a project related to any topic related to computer science but I would personally recommend going for C and C ++ Projects.

Advantage of using C:

C is the base of computer programming and once you start understanding it, you will not face any difficulty in learning new languages. Another advantage with C is that it doesn't require large computer resources and you can run its project on any machine whether you are using Windows or Linux servers.Not only that, because C is one of the oldest languages, you will get lot of free resources and books of C on the internet.

Once you start developing in C, you will also start understanding the limitation of C language and get an idea of why we had developed other programming languages.

C++ is for those students who want to get exposure to object-oriented programming. Developing a project on C Plus Plus is a great way to learn classes, objects, and constructors.

Personal finance refers to the financial decisions which an individual or a family unit is required to make to obtain, budget, save, and spend monetary resources over time, taking into account various financial risks and future life events.

Personal finance management is very important and useful in the long term. Each individual should know about his or her spending habits as well as earning sources.

This project can be done by Computer Science, BCA, MCA, and IT graduates.

Concept:

This application works as a small accounting software where we need to take input from the users, do some calculations inside and store these calculations and user input inside the database.

Procedure:

We need to design some forms to take input from the users. For eg. Form to take input of bills such as telephone, electricity or credit cards.

Once we take input, we will add all these values according to dates ( Weekly, Daily and Monthly Basis) and store them into our database.

We can add as many forms as user needs and store them accordingly. Sometimes we need to use a complex formula such as finding interest in the number of things like that, but that can be easily done using loops and variables. I am giving you some projects below from open source community which help you to understand this topic more.

Solar powered remote controlled aircraft

On December 17, 1903, when Wright brothers build the first aircraft, it became discovery, that changed the world completely. They build fixed-wing aircraft which are capable of flight using wings that generate lift due to the vehicle's forward airspeed and the shape of the wings. In the last century though, everything improved from the design of aircraft, fuel efficiency and power of the engine but aircraft fuel which is most important has not changed and become the leading cause of global warming.

Why?
If you read airplane history, you would find that human need and desire of flying is more powerful than flying with renewable energy. So, focus in the last century was only on designing and improving the efficiency of the engine and not on changing its fuel.

So, why now?
In the last decade, awareness of the general public about climate change has increased significantly. This awareness and fuel price that is rising at rocket speed creates catastrophic effect, which pressurizes us to think about alternative fuel for aircraft and one of these alternates is Solar Energy, which we are going to discuss today.

Is it possible?

Yes it is, recently Swiss-made Solar-Powered Plane, Solar Impulse completed its 4000 miles journey between Europe and Africa successfully. You can read more about it at the news website msnbc.

In this modern world where companies are focusing on green energy, cam less engine can become a great alternative.

A cam is a rotating or sliding piece in a mechanical linkage used especially in transforming rotary motion into linear motion or vice-versa. In an engine, it is connected to a shaft (e.g. a cylinder with an irregular shape) that strikes a lever at one or more points on its circular path.

In a traditional engine, the camshaft has a very important role to play while opening and closing of a valve. It was a necessary evil for an engine functioning. Furthermore, because of the camshaft, engineers need to choose either an efficient engine or a powerful engine but not with both qualities. This is one of the most important factors that make a camless engine a necessity. Though the idea of cam less engine existed from 1899, it has become the need of the modern world now, when we need power and efficiency both.

Is it possible to use water to power our cars?

Some people claim that it is possible and done before and other thinks, it has never been done and would need more time before this actually happens. But all of them believe that someday we can run our cars on water. I found this project idea interesting enough to discuss with you. If you are a believer in water fuel cell invented by American Stanley Allen Meyer. Then you should try this project and see whether we can run our cars on water or if we can generate power using water fuel cells?

Pure water with the help of SMS is a project based on getting pure water using Hand Pump. Though we have already discussed various projects based on water purification such as Pedal Powered Water Filter and Solar-powered water purification system but in Africa, the most common source of pure water is Hand Pump. If it stops working, people get forced to drink dirty water as an alternative. This project idea solves this problem.

People living in rural areas of Africa can use a mobile phone to drink clean water. Researchers of Britain has to build Data Transmitter which can be embedded inside the hand pump.

This transmitter sends SMS when the hand pump stops working. This transmitter would be installed in 70 villages of Kenya. Information about this technology has been discussed at the General of Hydroinformatics.

A floating wind turbine is an offshore wind turbine mounted on a floating structure that allows the turbine to generate electricity or pump water in water depths where bottom-mounted towers are not feasible.

Furthermore, the wind is more powerful over the sea in comparison to land. Though there are many ways we can use these turbines, today we will see how we can use them for pumping water.

We all know that water is precious and with a growing population and their needs, freshwater is getting even more worth full with each passing day. The main uses of freshwater are drinking, washing and Agriculture. Each year irrigation requires a large amount of water and one of the main sources of this water is rain. This makes rainwater harvesting a top priority for farmers in every country from east to west.

Why we need farm ponds?

Most of the farmers all around the world heavily depend upon rain for their agricultural needs. Crops are very sensitive and two or three delays of the watering can have a devastating impact on crop production. Farm ponds help them to become somewhat independent and they can timely give water to their crop irrespective of the time of rain. It also helps to improve groundwater significantly. Farms ponds with drip irrigation would play a great role in water management.

Pure water is precious and its value is known to those people who do not get it. According to the WHO, such disease-account for an estimated 4.1% of the total DALY(Disability-adjusted life year) global burden of disease, and cause about 1.8 million human deaths annually. Waterborne diseases are caused by pathogenic microorganisms that most commonly are transmitted in contaminated freshwater. In my last post, I discussed how we can purify it with solar energy. Though in summer solar water purifier is a good option in winter or rainy season it becomes very inefficient and slow.

We need a system which can work the whole year whether it is day or night. A pedal Powered water filter is one such solution. It is a green and pollution-free method of purifying water using human labor.

How it works?

We all know how nature filters our water. It evaporates dirty or seawater and later condenses it in the form of rain which is pure drinking water. Pedal-powered water purifier works on the same concept. In this project, we pedal our bicycle to transform water into vapor and later condense it to get clean water.

Waterborne diseases have a significant contribution to the total number of diseases around the world. Most of the developing countries' governments around the world are still struggling to provide clean water to their people. This problem is much more severe in some parts of Africa.

Today we will discuss how we can use solar energy to purify water. This would be a great project not only for you as your engineering project but for people whose life will change by your effort.

Knowledge sharing system

We humans love to share knowledge.We often share our thoughts with our friends , family members or office colleagues.Knowledge sharing is an online platform for all those people who loves to contribute with each other.Moreover, they will not only share but also gets real time feedback from readers.

Branches:
computer science and IT Students.

Advantages of Knowledge sharing system:

People with the same interest can interact with each other.
Author of any content is available to answer any query.
Real time updates.

Language Required:

You can build this system in whatever language you are comfortable with.For eg JSP,PHP,C# or Ruby but I would suggest you to use Content Management system(CMS) such as Drupal, Joomla or Ruby on Rails.Advantage with CMS is that it helps you to keep focus on project and remaining things would be handled by it.

Hydroponics is a method to grow plants without soil.As demand of food is increasing, we need to find ways to grow vegetables and fruits in whatever way possible.

Why do we need Hydroponics way of irrigation?

Limitation of land ,weather dependence and transportation cost are the factors because of which we should shift our focus from traditional methods to Hydroponic.Further more, we can grow more than one crop in same bag has great economic benefits.Research done by University of Florida found that this way of irrigation has profitable too.

In the colder part of the world,it is difficult to grow plants in winter because of lack of sunlight and harsh weather conditions.This method can be used to mitigate these cumbersome problems.

Solar bicycle consists of battery,DC-DC boost converter, Solar Panel, Motor and Motor controller.It will get its energy from three places brakes, pedals of the bicycle, and by solar-cell.

In recent years mobile has become household name. Its reach is wide and anyone can be contacted anywhere using mobile phones. In a last decade we have seen transformation in mobile technology and now it can be used for many purposes and not confined with only communication. Mobile Banking, Photography and Wireless Printing are some of the examples of its distinctive uses.Today, we will discuss that how farmers can use mobiles in agriculture.

This month we discussed lot of projects about irrigation and how we can make it greener. This idea of solar powered pump is also a part of that series which includes drip irrigation using wind energy and mechanical sprayer.Solar pump is a useful device for irrigation. In my opinion at hot places solar energy is much better than traditional methods because it works during day time and consumes no electricity or any fuel.

Solar turbine generators generate electricity in similar way as any other generator; the only difference is that they use sun light in the place of other sources such as coal, wood or petroleum gases.

We had discussed in solar powered steam engines that how we can use sun energy to power our engines. This project idea is extension of that talk. If we can connect solar powered engine to spin turbine connected to magnets and coil, we can able to generate electricity.

Hot water is essential part of human life. During winters, we all need it for our daily activities such as bathing and cleaning. To boil water we use various sources such as coal, petroleum fuel, wood, gas and electricity but most of our methods release greenhouse gases.

Nowadays, Gas geezers are very popular because of their efficiency. Gas geezers or water heaters burn gas instead of electricity as their heat supplier. There are two types of gas water heaters: With water storage tank and Without water tanks. We can use any from them but I would suggest tank less heater because using it , we would get continuous supply of hot water and it is energy efficient too.

We have discussed Drip irrigation powered by wind mill. I told you to use wind powered pump at the place of traditional one. Today we will move one step forward and find out how? In the meanwhile, I would also share some related videos. So, let’s begin our journey of windmill pump:

Advantages of using windmill pump?

It powers itself from green energy.
According to many estimates, it can recover its cost in 5 years.
It can be used anywhere, even in areas where electricity has not reached yet.
If used with drip irrigation, it works automatically without human intervention.

Working below the car is very common among the car mechanics and they do it with ease. Moreover, crawling under the car is very vital for their profession too. But, mechanics with disabilities due to old age or accident, found it difficult to work under it and in some cases, they might lose their jobs.

Generating Electricity from Waste water

Tons and tons of waste dumped upon our mother earth each day. This waste not only causes damage to our environment but has health risk too. To use this water again, our governments are using water treatment plants. Project Idea we are going to discuss today would use these plants to power our homes.

How?

We all know that, in nature different materials biodegrade at different rates. It is a chemical dissolution of materials by bacteria or other biological means. Bacteria in the presence of oxygen produce carbon dioxide and water, but when we stop the supply of oxygen they start to produce electrons and protons. They were first found by Professor M.C. Potter in 1911. When we use them to generate electricity in a cell, this cell is called as Microbial fuel cell.

Solar powered Steam engine

Steam engine brought industrial revolution in 19th century. Moreover, we can say that they were the engine of growth. At present time too, they are widely used in nuclear and coal power plants.

We discussed steam engine briefly in our post steam engine powered bicycle. Today we will discuss how we can produce steam using solar power?

Why do we need to use solar power?

Traditional steam engines mainly use coal and nuclear fuel to power themselves. Each of these methods has their repercussion. Coal powered engine damage our environment and after Japan Tsunami we know that use of nuclear fuel can be dangerous. Moreover, there are other strong reasons too, one of the most important is that sun light is free and abundant while coal and uranium are not.

How this project works?

To understand it, first you should know about how steam engine works?

Steam engines produce steam by boiling water and later use that steam for pushing piston in to and fro motion.My idea is, if we can use energy from the sun, to boil our water and left remaining steam engine intact, it would work exactly like our traditional engine except that our engine is powered by green energy.

To boil water using solar energy, we need a large magnify glass focused on our Solar Evacuated tube.
Evacuated tubes absorb solar energy and convert it into heat for use in water heating. There are several types of evacuated tubes used in solar thermal collectors.This type of tube is chosen for its reliability, performance and cost effectiveness. We connect this tube with our engine using pipe and pass steam through it.

Football doesn’t needs any introduction, it is one of the most famous sport every played on earth. This game had taken giant leap when played by robot. I have seen that in any robotic engineering competition, game of robots football is inevitable.

Robot Football requires smart movable robots that need to act as a team in real time and adjust in a very dynamic environment to accomplish definite objectives.It is very complex topic, but I would try to share basics of this project with you.

Rough sketch of fruit picker robot using Microsoft Paint

Have you seen large fruits garden with lots of fruits. For a fruit gardener, it is extremely important to harvest fruit in time. In a large garden there is need of many people to select which fruit is ripen enough to pick out and which doesn't?

Mechanical Sprayer

If you know about farming, pests cause more damages to crop in comparison to any other factor. One of the solutions for this problem is spraying pesticides. Pesticides have their advantages as well as disadvantages. Which type of pesticides is good for nature is altogether different topic and we would discuss about them later. All we know is spraying pesticides is one of the most pertinent things in farming.

I hope you have seen people spraying in the farms; they use electrical or fossil fuel sprayer to spray pesticides on the field. Today, we will talk about alternatives such as mechanical sprayer.

Wind Powered Drip Irrigation

Whenever, I visit any nearby farm land, one thing I notice mostly is its dependence on continuous water supply. Some areas have sufficient water but in most of the places, I found that they are heavily dependent on ground water and rain. Moreover, many people still use traditional methods of irrigation due to which large amount of water get wasted.

We have discussed RC Cars before with electric engine and stirling engine. Today we are going to talk about Nitro Car, which has more similarities with cars we use in our daily life.

So, what is Nitro Car?

In my own simple definition, it is a car which runs on fuel consist of methane, nitro methane and oil.It has small internal combustion engine which gets it spark from glow plug powered by batteries inside a car. For more detailed info you can anytime refer to Wikipedia.

What is Glow Plug?

It is similar to spark plug, a helical wire filament usually made up of platinum, but mostly used in small cars. It gets its spark from batteries, compression heat and catalyst effect of methane and platinum.

Stirling Engine mini RC Car

We had discussed both Stirling Engine and Remote control cars in two separate posts. In this post we will combine these two technologies. Before we start our discussion, I would briefly describe both of them.

Stirling Engine

1.Piston 2. Displacer, Hot gases in the left side of Heat displacer, push it forward to move piston.

It is an external combustion engine where combustion occurs outside the engine itself. An advantage with this engine is that, it can be used with any type of heating source both renewable and non renewable. Basic form of engine consists of one cylinder, hot at one end and cold at the other, loose fitting displacer, power piston and flywheel.

When we heat at one end, gas starts to expand and push loose displacer forward, which is connected with piston which eventually revolves the flywheel. With its revolution it pushes back the fitting displacer to its original position having cold gas at both ends again. This cycle continues till the heat is supplied from heat source.

RC Cars

These cars are usually powered by electric batteries can be controlled by remote control. It consists of three components, transmitter (our remote), receiver (which receives transmitter signal) and car itself. Transmitter role is not only limited to receiving signals but it also transforms these radio waves into electric signals and controls the components. Most of these cars use Amplitude modulation but some newer once also use Frequency modulation. If you have never heard about modulation, our fm and am radio works with same transmitter, receiver concept. By the way, frequency most often used in mini remote cars is 2.4 GHz.

RC Cars itself is a big concept and out of scope for this post, for this project idea, I would rather recommend you to buy an RC car from toy store and install our engine on it. If it works, then you can shift your focus to build one car by yourself.

Highway Wind Turbines

We all know that how important wind power is.The only disadvantage with wind power is that it needs continuous flow of wind to generate electricity. Moreover, this is the reason that most of wind mills area is limited to large farmlands, sea and hills.

Project idea we are discussing today can solve this limitation problem. The only place in the world , where winds keeps on flowing irrespective of season whether day or night is Highways . What if we install our wind turbine at Dividers?

The key element of this project is a variable capacitor, which can convert mechanical energy into electrical energy with the help of work done by an external force against the electric field formed between the two plates of the capacitor.

How many times you heard about car accident caused just because of tire burst or due to break fail?
Have you ever imagined that these accidents not only cause harm to car passengers but also to innocent people on the streets. Even though these accidents are random and can happen with anyone but they can be avoided with the help of modern engineering and technology.

Some of the earliest Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) were line following mobile robots. They might follow a visual line painted or embedded in the floor or ceiling or an electrical wire in the floor. Most of these robots operated a simple "keep the line in the center sensor" algorithm.

Generating electricity using roads

There are millions of cars on streets around the world at any given time of day. Whenever, we talk about cars; we start to think about negatives such as pollution , congestion etc etc. Despite all these cons , cars are essential part of our life and project would discuss today use these cars for generating electricity.

How?
We would use Piezoelectric material below the roads.When cars roll over it, due to pressure exerted by the cars, it starts generating electric current.

Energy Harvesting from a Piezoelectric Sidewalk

Millions of people use sidewalk daily which is a path along the side of a road. A sidewalk may accommodate moderate changes in grade (height) and is normally separated from the vehicular section by a curb.

We all have heard about Hydraulic lifts sometime in our life, but some of you may think that how it works or how to build one for ourselves.

Today we are going to discuss about lifting cars using Hydraulics, which is based on Pascal concept.

Why understanding Hydraulics important?
Hydraulics is a topic in applied science and engineering dealing with the mechanical properties of liquids. Fluid mechanics provides the theoretical foundation for hydraulics, which focuses on the engineering uses of fluid properties.

Stairs are names for a construction designed to bridge a large vertical distance by dividing it into smaller vertical distances, called steps.They become integral part of human life and in every construction you can find stairs in one or the other design.Moreover, they are so significant that whether you like them or not but you can't avoid them.

So what's the problem?

Every thing has its own pros and cons and stairs is no exception. When we think of stairs we know that how problematic it for old people or person with disability to climb it. Not only that, but for common person to carry heavy material using them.

Imagine if you want to carry something heavy with you on stairs , you probably would know that it is very difficult and risky task, sometime involved more than one person, if thing is more heavier.

We all know that popular conventional energy resources such as oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power are accompanied by problems of air and water pollution, resource depletion and the greenhouse effect, all of which are becoming increasingly unacceptable and difficult to afford. In the 21st century PV (Solar Energy) can potentially meet the rapidly growing demand for electricity with minimal environmental consequence.

Despite being one of the best alternative , solar energy is far behind from coal and nuclear energy in terms of market share. Moreover, it is costlier and less efficient than its counterparts.To improve its efficiency and reducing cost, we should move towards advanced solar cells such as 3 dimensional.

Three-dimensional solar cells that capture nearly all of the light that strikes them and could boost the efficiency of photovoltaic systems while reducing their size, weight and mechanical complexity. The new 3D solar cells, created at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, capture photons from sunlight using an array of miniature “tower” structures that resemble high-rise buildings in a city street grid.

This idea of 3D Cell is of William Yuan is a freshman from Beaverton, Oregon.Yuan has developed a 3D solar cell that has the potential to revolutionize solar power.At the heart of Yuan's project is a solar cell that can harness both visible and ultraviolet light.Yuan's solar cells are calculated to absorb about five hundred times more light then a conventional solar cell and nine times more than advanced 3D solar cells.

More Info

Thermal Engineering Projects

The projects of Thermal Engineering includes topics related to theory and applications of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics or heat, and mass transfers. The best example of this is Air conditioner. This is one of the most important branches of Mechanical engineering and we can not imagine even a single important task which can be done without using this branch of engineering in one or the other way.

Some project ideas related to this branch are :

Prediction of temperature and humidity distribution in a room with ceiling panel

CFD Modelling of coal combustion in drop tube reactor

Simulation of coal-air flow in a bowl type coal mill

Mathematical modeling of heat transfer in walking beam type reheat furnace

Thermoacoustics is the study of the interactions between thermodynamic and acoustic phenomena. Thermoacoustics is a relatively new field of science and engineering. Few devices based on this principle have been made thus far. Most are for research purposes.

Thermoacoustic refrigerators have no ozone-depleting or toxic coolant and few or no moving parts, therefore, require no dynamic sealing or lubrication.

Concept :

The above formula states that there is a relation between pressure changes and temperature changes. A dynamic pressure would cause a dynamic temperature and vice versa

Interference between the incoming and reflected wave is now imperfect since there is a difference in amplitude causing the standing wave to travel little, giving the wave acoustic power. In the acoustic wave, parcels of gas adiabatically compress and expand. Pressure and temperature change simultaneously, when the pressure reaches a maximum or minimum, so does the temperature. Heat pumping along with a stack in a standing wave device can now be described using the Brayton cycle.

Thermoacoustic engines (sometimes called "TA engines") are thermoacoustic devices that use high-amplitude sound waves to pump heat from one place to another, or conversely use a heat difference to induce high-amplitude sound waves.

Thermoacoustics is a relatively new field of science and engineering.

Related Projects:

Mechanical Projects
Solar Powered Refrigerator

Flying Cars

A flying car is an aircraft that can also travel along roads. All the working examples have required some manual or automated process of conversion between the two modes of operation.

We all have heard about steam engines, a big giant engine on the train, producing enough power to pull huge boogies attached to it. But today, we are going to discuss engines opposite to train engines, an engine which is a small engine but produces enough torque to move our bicycle forward.

Have you ever heard of energy poverty? Energy poverty is very rare in developed countries but in many African and Asian countries, it is pretty common.

Someday, if you get a chance to travel to these remote parts of the world, you would amaze to find how important moonlight is!!. These villages have no street lights nor lights at home. Whenever they need some lights they burn kerosene lamps for that.

We have discussed a lot about LED in our " LED Light" post, what about powering it with solar energy. Solar LED is composed of a LED lamp, a photovoltaic solar panel, and a rechargeable battery.

This project idea is for students who are interested in green energy projects. It would be very useful for developing countries, but with one disadvantage that it has more buying costs than any of its counterparts. Even though its operating cost is negligible, we need to provide it at cheaper rates so that it can be afforded even in the last part of the world.

Millions of people do their workout every day. Imagine if we can capture the kinetic energy created while pedaling or running and converts it into electricity that can be channeled back into power outlets. The idea makes a lot of sense when you think about all the energy wasted in gym workouts.

The traditional way of doing auction is still popular but due to its limitations more and more people are thinking of shifting online.

An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder. In economic theory, an auction may refer to any mechanism or set of trading rules for exchange.

Sixth Sense technology of Pranav Mistry

'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

The SixthSense prototype comprises a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera contained in a pendant like wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to a mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks users' hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Search for new ideas!

TOPICS