I have been slacking on these blogs and in an attempt to catch up and explain what has been going on on my side of researching and looking for ways to contribute to the project. This blog will encapsulate the work I have done this past month. I will try to keep everyone updated with on how my contributions can help advance this project to the next level and understand more the inner workings of this project to better help manage and develop the Spartan Superway.
This past month has consisted of deep research into possible configurations of wiring the motors. I have been researching and learning different wiring techniques and how different appliances and parts work in tandem with one another to obtain our functional specifications of the bogie. With the bogie having to move forward and backward at 2 MPH, how fast we reach that mark and what we are using to control it become a very important to continue discussing with my team as well as thinking about how everything else is going to connect with wayside power and the motor team. With the motor team introducing brush less hub motor, I have to study how they operate. The main difference between a traditional DC motor and a BLDC motor is that the BLDC motor using magnetic fields and coils to rotate based on the fields induced in the motor. This is how we will begin to control the motors and how we can vary their speeds to get our targeted numbers. More research and rapid prototyping will be coming in the near future due to the nature of our project. Being able to quickly test a small scale configuration and seeing what works and what needs to be reconfigured will be a large part of our work this semester. Once a working small scale prototpye of our control system is in place we will be able to obtain higher grade materials that work with the higher voltages and currents that will be present in the full scale model. In the next few weeks, using our design and functional specifications, a working small scale model will be able to be implemented with the help of the motor and wayside power teams.
Thank you for reading and will keep you posted of future findings. If you would like to see the controls team progress so far please see our team blog for full scale controls.
