Week 6: The Bench Inspection

The bench inspection is generally successful today, and here is the product for our project.

Week 6: Prepared for the Bench Inspection Tomorrow

This is the week for the bench inspection, and it will be held tomorrow.
In the bench inspection, we will give a presentation for the tutor and the another accessor. In this section, Lu Huimin will talk about the Introduction part and she will introduce all the group members. For the Methodology part, Mao Mengkai will explain three key words in the software Homer Energy in our project. Then Ni Kai will briefly talk about the results for this project and mainly discuss the information on the graphs. At last Shan Xin will talk about the Discussion and Conclusion parts, and he will analyze the key points in the project.
After the presentation is over, the group leader Ni Kai will demonstrate the software Homer Energy and make the listeners briefly understand the process. All the members are prepared for the questions that may be asked.
Here is the final poster for the project:

Week 5: The summary of the Meeting with Dr. Jiang and the Lab Day

The meeting with Dr. Jiang at 05/03/2015:
All the members were at Dr. Jiang's office on this day, and we displayed the draft of our final report for Dr. Jiang. Dr. Jiang looked through it and asked us to emphasize the Methodology part of the report as it give important information for the readers. The MATLAB simluation results should be simplified because they are just the appoarches to derive data, not the purpose of this project. Furthermore, the understanding of major concepts in HOMER ENERGY is not familiar to the members in this group, and we need to have the ability to interpret what we have learned to the listeners in the presentation.

The Lab Day at 06/03/2015:
On this day, all the members gathered together to revise the report to make the logic clear and some complex parts were removed. After the report is adjusted, the poster is almost completed, and the design for the poster has been changed a little bit today.
Here is the poster designed on the lab day:

After a meeting today, the methodology part will be simplified and the Abstract part will be added. In addition, the sensitivity analysis for the second case will be changed into the relationship between the PV production and the solar radiation rate.
Here is the poster revised today:

Week 4: The Lab Day

Yesterday was the lab day, and all the members were present in the computer laboratory. As the sections of processing data and doing analysis have been basically finished, our team is now working on the part of displaying the results and explaining the principles.
Before this day, the members completed three reports for the three cases we focused on. I was combining the contents to the main part of the final report. For Mengkai Mao, the task was writing the introduction which is divided into three parts: the three cases, a micro-grid and Homer Energy. Because these three parts are all the cores for our project, we need to introduce them to the readers. As a bench inspection will be held in two weeks, I asked Huimin Lu to design the poster for our project. Shan Xin and I were revising the contents for the report and we discussed which part to be paid attention to.

Week 4: Meet the supervisor Dr. Lin Jiang

Today all the members in our group met the tutor Dr. Lin Jiang in his office. This week we wrote three reports to introduce the situations for the three cases, show the methods of obtaining and processing data, and analyze the results. As the logic of the reports is clear and the methods used are reasonable, Dr. Jiang was satisfied with our achievements.
The important point is that for the presentation section, we need to have the ability to explain the principles of optimizations and sensitivity simulations so that the listeners can understand what we have done. Dr. Jiang appreciated that it is a good practice for our final report and also for the future of being an engineer.
What we are going to do next is sort out all the information and complete a draft for the final report, and then it will be much easier to prepare for the presentation and the poster.

Week 4: Summary and Achievements for two meetings

This week two group meetings were held.
The first one is on 22/2/2015 Sunday, and all the members were present. A draft report for the first case was written by Ni Kai, and the other members had a look at it, and they discussed the structure of the draft, and gave some advice on it. Some parts of the draft were revised to make the overall description more clear. After that, the members were divided into two groups to write drafts for the second and third cases by using the draft for the first case as a model. The members were encouraged to add contents which are useful for explaining the simulation results to the reports. All the members discussed the sustainable design and ethics aspect report which was written by Lu Huimin, and revised some parts of it.
The second one is on 25/2/2015 which is today, Wednesday, and all the members were present. Three reports for three cases were finished, and the members looked through all the reports, and there are too many details for the group to analyze. As a lot of data is not easy to be analyzed, the members selected some vital data. By using graphs, the results can be explained from different degrees, and the question is that which degree is the most important one. The sustainable design report was submitted via Vital today as well.

Week3: Meeting the Supervisor and the Lab Day

Yesterday all the members in our group met Dr. Jiang in his office. We decided to show him the achievements we got in the last two weeks, and I brought my laptop there to display the simulation results and the contents on my logbook.
Dr. Jiang appreciated our efforts, while he gave us some advice. It is important that we present our results to him in the form of a report, while the contents in the logbook were in the form which is similar to a diary and is not clear enough. Dr. Jiang advised us to introduce more about the software Homer Energy, and explain more about the principles of calculating the results. Once we explain the principles to the listeners, they will be able to learn what we have done in this project.

Today is the third lab day, and we finished the simulations for the three cases together. In the morning, Shan Xin sorted all the important formulas in the software and gave some tips for them. Mao Mengkai worked on a mini report of introducing micro-grids and he searched for relevant information of applications of Homer Energy. Lu Huimin was asked to write the report for sustainable development which is required for each group. I was focusing on complete the data for each case by using Homer Energy.
In the afternoon, we discussed the statistics for the components in the three cases, and did simulations for many times to examine the resonability of the data. After a large amount of simulations, we researched the results and solved some of the problems. After the lab, we decided to finish a brief report for case 1 on Sunday and then it would be easier to finish the others.