Engineering Commons^™

Hybrid Ac/Dc House: The Road To A Sustainable Future, Nicholas Mcadams, Luis Rodriguez

Electrical Engineering

The Hybrid AC/DC house is a sustainable alternative to preexisting residential power systems. The implementation of a DC bus in current homes will allow inefficient DC-AC and AC-DC conversions to be circumvented. This provides a direct path for current to flow to DC loads from DC sources such as solar panels to minimize power losses. In doing so, this will give users the ability to power their homes strictly from renewable sources and substantially decrease reliance on the utility. For this purpose, the hybrid AC/DC house is also designed in such a way to be entirely grid-independent to provide power …

Dc-Dc 4-Switch Buck-Boost Converter For Energy Harvesting From Elliptical Machines, Alexander C. Samietz, Gustavo Guzman

Electrical Engineering

The senior project report documents the process of replacing the network of resistors inside an elliptical machine with a DC-DC buck-boost converter. The buck-boost DC-DC converter accepts a wide input range of 5-60 Volts, with an output of 36 Volts for the most efficient use of the already available microinverter. The microinverter reclaims the lost energy and safely distributes it back to the electrical grid. The addition of this project reduces heat emissions from wasted energy and shrinks the carbon footprint of its users.

Adaptive Light Dimmer, Jonathan Sato, William Xiong

Electrical Engineering

This project, the Adaptive Light Dimmer for the DC House, senses a room's light content and adjusts a lamp's light intensity accordingly, thus regulating the room's light content. The device is designed to work with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar energy. This would be useful in less developed countries where AC electricity is not well spread and renewable DC, such as solar, can be better utilized. It functions by using the TSL2561 light sensor to sense light, ATTiny85 microcontroller to output PWM to the LED driver, LT3795 LED driver to output current to an LED and LT3014 …

Current Protection For The Energy Harvesting From Exercise Machines (Ehfem) Project, Colton Crivelli

Electrical Engineering

The Energy Harvesting from Exercise Machines (EHFEM) project intends to create an exercise machine that recycles the energy expended by an athlete operating the machine by sending it to the electric grid. The work done by the user goes through a DC-DC converter and an inverter in order to prepare it for delivery to the grid. A protection circuit ensures that the inverter does not try to pull too much current from the DC-DC converter. The project implements a current protection system that ensures the system doesn’t experience an overcurrent condition.

Swing Human Powered Generator: For The Dc House Project, Juan Vicente Avelar, Juan Jose Galindo, Juan Pramyr Ramos

Electrical Engineering

The Play Park Human Powered Generator project addresses various ways of generating power. More specifically, this project entails the design and construction of the Swing Power Generator to provide electrical power from mechanical energy. The swing generator will eventually be used as part of the human-powered generators utilized in the DC House project.

A swing generator prototype was built for this project, which demonstrates the feasibility of its use for electrical power source. Detailed design and construction of the swing generator is presented in this report along with results from hardware testing.

Teaching Sustainability Analysis In Electrical Engineering Lab Courses, David Braun

Electrical Engineering

Laboratory courses represent an incompletely tapped opportunity to teach sustainability concepts. This work introduces and evaluates a simple strategy used to teach sustainability concepts in electrical engineering laboratory courses. The technique would readily adapt to other disciplines. The paper presents assessment data and a wiki containing student sustainability analyses.