Blog 2: Idea Selection and Ideation

Thanks for tuning in again :D

In this blog, I will be writing about what I've been up to these past few weeks.

Brainstorming:

In class, my group and I were tasked with making improvements to an existing chemical device. What is a chemical device, you ask? It is a class of chemical product that essentially uses chemical engineering principles to convert a feed stream into a separate product. One such example of this is a coffee maker, which was reverse engineered in our first practical.

Anyways, we had used the solar panel as our base chemical device to improve on. Initially, we had focused on creating as many ideas as possible instead of making quality ideas, resulting in some wacky ideas such as space-oriented solar panels that orbit the sun. There was no limit to my team's imagination, and we managed to create 25 ideas in around half an hour.

A few ideas that we created in class

Feasibility of ideas:

Out of the numerous ideas we made, we had to select five of the ones that sounded most achievable, that is, to be prototyped. We had used different prerequisites such as the time taken to complete our project, the cost of prototyping our ideas, and also the technical feasibilities surrounding our ideas. Here's what we came up with:

Adding bumps to solar panels

This adds more surface area to the solar panels, increasing its ability to absorb sunlight.

Solar panels containing coolant

Coolant reduces the temperature of the solar panel, decreasing its resistance and thus improving effectiveness.

Self-tilting solar panels

Related to the basis of the first idea, tilting increases the ability of the solar panel to absorb more energy by tilting itself towards the sun, increasing surface contact area.

COWS (Not the animal):

After shortlisting our ideas, we had to further weigh our ideas against a few criteria, mainly COWS. COWS is an acronym standing for Criteria, Options, Weightage and Score. This decision matrix proved to be helpful for our group as it allowed us to rank our ideas not as a whole, but in parts, empowering us to notice the flaws in our design. However, because of

the brilliant rebuttals of my group as to why each idea was good in its own way, we had a difficult time deciding on which idea we would take on. Thankfully, we eventually came to agree that the coolant-based solar panel could have more advantages over the other ideas.

Random stuff:

Moving on to what I have done the past few weeks, I used an online software called 'Fusion 360' that allowed me to create sketches and objects online and bring them to life using a 3D printer. Pretty cool! In the first day of using said software, we learnt to make a nametag.

Anyways, that's about it for me so far! Hope y'all folks have a good day. Thanks for reading.