Weekly Progress

Week 1

This is the first class of ENGR-103. In class, we introduced ourselves a little bit. We formed a group of three freshmen from ME major. Erik Brockel graduated from Ocean Township High School in New Jersey. He hopes to use his degree to work with and advance automotive technologies in the future. Yanzong Jiang is a freshman who comes from China. He is really familiar with machines. He even started to use machines to make some wooden furniture since he was seven. Ziyi Qu also comes from China. However he graduated from Christopher Dock high school which is not far away from Philadelphia. We choose Erik as our leader.

After a short brain storm, we picked solar water heater as our topic. Then we began to do some research. I think we already have a brief idea about how this solar water heater works. This is an amazing group!

Week 2

Since last week we already picked a topic--solar water heater, this week we are going to move on and make a plan. First, we finish our proposal including a short introduction of our topic, some technical activities and budget. Besides that, we also created a timeline. We will follow the timeline strictly,which will help us finish this project well. 

Week 3

Every thing went well so far. According the shopping list we did last week, Erik and Yanzong purchases the wood and cooper at Home Depot. We also order some materials on Amazon.

We met a problem that how to bend this cooper. Erik tried to bend the cooper by himself, but it does not seems really good. The water cannot go though it. Therefore, we emailed to Mark in our machine shop and hope our problem will be solved. There are also several options to bend the cooper, we made a matrix to decide which method fits our project the best. The whole matrix can be found in the background section. Finally, we choose to make a coiled solar water heater. 

We got the cooper all coiled up in the machine shop! Our cooper pipe looks really nice!

Week 4

In week four a good amount of the construction was finished. The wooden box was made, complete with inlet and outlet holes for the tubing. Also, the copper piping was bent into a tighter coil to fit in the box. In week five we hope to have a preliminary final product that we can begin testing on. 

Erik coiled the copper wire, Yanzong built the wooden box, and Jesse started making the experiments that will be run on the solar heater. 

Week 5

In 5th week, most of the construction was finished. The solar heater has already been able to heat up water. Next,the experiments are going to be run on the solar heater to determine whether the copper is needed to paint into black or not. The details of experiments are stated in "Experiments section". We did the first half experiments in part A--testing the rate of heating up with a raw copper. The data shows that a raw copper could only have a limited heat absorption capacity. We decide to paint it into black and finish the second half of part A.

Figure 1:The whole structure of solar heater 

Figure 2: Conducting the experiment

Figure 3: Painted black

Week 6

Start form this week,we begin to pay attention to test our structure. Last week, we already tested the how the raw copper works. This week,we want to compare the temperature of water changes over time with raw (copper pipe) and painted pipe. The data shows that painted pipe could heat up the water much faster than raw copper pipe do. We also tested the maximum temperature it can reach. It took about 1 hour to heat the water up to 37 ℃.

Erik is also working on the 3D model of our structure in Creo.

Table 1: Raw vs. Painted 

Figure 1: Conducting the experiment

Figure 2: Data

Week 7

This week we continued doing our tests. First, Erik and Yanzong did the flow rate test. Under different flow rates, the heat rates should also be different. We predicted that a low flow rates could lead to a high heat rate. They tested the temperature changes under 3 flow rate. The data confirms our prediction but it does not show a distinct difference. Second, they also did the volume test.The data shows that it takes such a longer time to heat up 1 quart water than 1 gallon water. 

Week 8

Everything is going to be finished! We are working on scaling the data up to calculate the final time it needs to heat up a whole pool. We tried different equations to see which one fits our condition the best. At last，we figured out it needs 39 hours to heap up a pool.

Erik is still working on the final report. He is also preparing the final presentation as well.