Village Power - The Community Charging Station  REMIX 

Hello, we are students in the 2009/10 Industrial Design class at Kansas University in Lawrence Kansas USA. We are interested in applying socially directed design to make meaningful contributions to solving everyday problems faced by the majority of people in our world today. We are offering our collaboration as design students to contribute to this community charging station and assist in advancing its presentation or implementation in some way. Inspired by the problem statement posted we have ideas and questions we hope can be clarified by collaborative input from those of you who are experts in your field or have lived or observed the condition the community charging station intends to resolve. Here are some of the initial questions we would like some help with:

1.) Have the solar panels had a direct effect on the economies of West Africa? Or is this primarily oriented in improving the lives of the villagers.

2.) Has your organization thought about using a mobile charging station. This would include a maneuverable charging station with multiple compartments for batteries; which, then could be checked out and distributed to the people on a nightly basis.

3.) Given a typical village, how many solar panels are needed and what are the approximate sizes of the panels?

4.) Do the people that have been trained to take care of the solar panels have to adjust the panels throughout the day/year for optimum sun intake?

            -Suggestion: the use of a sundial could be benificial in this process.

Thanks for your time, we hope our ideas are of use and encourage your effort. Feedback is appreciated if possible, including help in other ways.

Group: Neal N., Sara H., Matt C.

Post 2    (11/2/09)

Hi, this is our second post for our proposed idea above. We have done some more research on the optimal sun-gathering positions for the mobile charging station we are proposing. If anyone would like to view this please let me know at this email address: [email protected]. We believe the incorporation of a durable and easy to read sundial would easily be maintained in a rural village with minimal difficulties of integrating a complicated computer system.  Along with this, we have looked into an economical solar-powered lantern from a company by the name of d.light design. The address is http://www.dlightdesign.com/product_nova.html. After researching on the site, our group has decided to incorporate a design similar to the Kiran model of lamp. It could be easily charged on our proposed mobile charging cart housing  lamps to support a village's lighting needs. The proposed "charging station" cart would be equipped with a large framed rigid solar panel to provide easy access power to those in the remotest of places. Finally, our class was looking at a modern wheel chair design that incorporates heavy duty, all-terrain tires that may be useful in this application. Here is that website...http://projecthdesign.org/projects/whirlwind.html

A question we had...

1.What is the ratio of the size of the solar panel  compared to the actual wattage is produces for use in hours? (After solving this question we can then work on dimensions for the charging cart and all its attributes. Despite our research this is the most pertinent question that has yet to be answered.)