Grady James
Research Question:What would enable the commercial implementation of battery storage technologies for the expansion of the renewable energy sector?
Thesis Statement:Regarding modern batteries, "Unfortunately, their limitations of high cost, insufficient energy density, and blemished safety have held back the large- scale applications of Li-ion batteries(Gu Peng 1)” in the renewable energy sector.
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Thesis Paper:
Action Project Description:The aim of my senior project was to apply my newfound knowledge from my thesis and apply it in some capacity to my life and community. There is a multitude of applications for battery storage in our modern era of technology. However, in the end, I settled upon the concept of applying battery storage to an ever-present problem when raising poultry on my family's ranch. The excrement of the chickens is very high in nitrogen and too much of this nitrogen distributed in one location in a field kills the vegetation. Normally the solution is to tow the chicken coop trailer with a vehicle every so often. This task is relatively cumbersome and time-consuming. I wanted to use a solar panel to charge a battery and have the battery drive the chicken trailer forward by some means.
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What my final project resulted in was attaching an electric winch to the tongue of the trailer and driving a stake in front of the trailer to winch off of. Then a programmable computer chip would be used to adaptively either use a cell phone chip to via an app on your cell phone to control the movement of the trailer or simply programming the chip to turn on and off periodically. In the end because of computer chip hardware restrictions I had to settle on programming a timer to turn the winch on and off periodically.
This project will not only be benefiting the land on my family's ranch by now distributing the impact of the chickens better but also the community. I will also be raising 150 meat chickens in the trailer this summer to benefit my local community with good access to sustainably raised, organic, free-range, antibiotic, and hormone-free chicken.
This project will not only be benefiting the land on my family's ranch by now distributing the impact of the chickens better but also the community. I will also be raising 150 meat chickens in the trailer this summer to benefit my local community with good access to sustainably raised, organic, free-range, antibiotic, and hormone-free chicken.
