Engineering Commons^™

Designing A Power Distribution System For The Arce 257 Revit Structural Model, Reid Wilhelm

Electrical Engineering

The construction industry needs engineers. Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineers, better known as MEPs, comprise a large number of employees who design and assist in the building of commercial structures. In particular, electrical engineers design power distribution systems for these buildings, including the power, lighting, low voltage, and fire protection subsystems.

Here at Cal Poly, architectural engineers enrolled in ARCE 257 create authentic structural plans for a fictitious two-story structure. This senior project transforms these structural plans into an architectural model and creates a power distribution system for the entire building. This is done through a building information modeling (BIM) …

Scaled Synthetic Aperture Rader Development, Jason Garvey Schray

Master's Theses

Several previous Cal Poly thesis projects involve synthetic aperture radar (SAR), automatic target recognition (ATR), and tracking. SAR data was either accessed from a publicly available database or generated using complex computer modeling software. The motivation for this dual thesis project is to design and construct a scaled SAR system to support Cal Poly radar projects. Ideally this is a low-cost, high resolution SAR architecture that produces raw range Doppler data for any desired target area. To that end, a scaled SAR system was successfully designed, built, and tested. The current SAR system, however, does not perform azimuthal compression and …

Solar-Powered Hot Tub, Jonathan Peterson, Anthony Zepeda

Electrical Engineering

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a solar-powered hot tub. The concept of this project was to design an independently-operated hot tub powered by a 12V rechargeable battery, charged during the day by a single 400W solar panel. For this purpose, a twenty-year-old name-brand hot tub was purchased, in used condition. The plumbing, AC electrical wiring, and mechanical pumps were all removed and replaced with new components to meet our design specifications. Additionally, a solar water-heater was designed and integrated into the system to directly apply the sun’s heat to water pumped in and out of the tub, …