Water heater
This project was split into a few different parts first we designed a solar water heater that heated any amount of water only using the sun. We could only use plastic tubing, copper tubing, insulation, aluminum foil, cardboard, lenses, plastic sheeting, and a water container. My group chose to use a a design that used a parabola to focus as much light as possible directly onto a painted copper pipe filled with water.
daylighting house design
For this portion of the project me and my group had to design a model house that only the light of the sun and nothing else. We had a few options on how to do this. We could use light shelves to reflect the sun light up into rooms through the windows. we could also use skylights, clerestory windows, and solar tubes. In our design we used all of these techniques to see which ones worked best. After designing and building a model of our daylighting house we tested it by holding a light at the different angles of the sun throughout the year and seeing how much light was spread throughout the different rooms of the model house. After the test we preformed we found that large windows and clerestory windows with large white walls behind them to defuse the light worked best to light up a house.
Material heat capacity lab
For these test our goal was to see how different materials held and were affected by heat from the sun. We did this placing a variety of materials used for building, under a heat lamp and taking the temperature at the start, 5 minutes in, and at the end at 10 minutes. We then graphed all of the results that we found.
Wind Turbine Designs
This was a very short part of the overall project, we designed some different kinds of wind turbines and tested them using small scale models.
Our final Tiny House Design
The last and main objective of this project was to design a energy efficient tiny house. we did this using thermodynamics and everything that we have learned in the duration of this project.
key Content and Ideas
The design of our houses had a lot to do with Thermodynamics. Everything has a specific heat capacity which is the measure of how much heat an object can hold and is measured in (J/g°c). The higher heat capacity an object or substance has the slower it heats and cools. The Lower heat capacity an object or substance has the quicker it heats and cools. For example Water has a high specific heat capacity and Iron has a low specific heat capacity. Heat is the energy due to kinetic vibration of molecules and is represented in ( J or Joules ).
Our Tiny House Presentation
Passive solar
The passive solar idea is about how at different times of year you can use the Earth's tilt and where the sun is in the sky to provide the heat and light that is needed in the winter and the shade and coolness that is needed during the summer. In Summer the sun is at a higher angle in the sky so you need overhangs to keep shade on the windows so it doesn't get to hot and insulating roofing to keep the inside colder. In the winter the sun is lower in the sky and it is colder so you need walls that can catch the heat and release it slower during the night to keep the house warm longer.
|
Reflection
This project was very long but my group was abe to stay on task most of the time and we were able to produce a good end result. I think that we could have worked better together but we all contributed a lot to this project.
My Group: Jackson Hilton, Alexis Bishop, and Aiden Pester