Energy-appropriate 2 passenger "parking efficient"

all-season community vehicle

There is a need for a compact 2-passenger vehicle powered by alternative energy that will be marketable for intra-campus and intra-community travel. The vehicle must address the problems of pollution, oil dependency, oil consumption, parking, and money spent on gas. It must be high-quality, safe, aesthetically appealing, weatherproof and capable of being used all year.

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Synopsis from teams 1, 2 and 5:

After analyzing the data collected, we decided to pursue this project based on the possible impact on reducing fuel consumption and dependence on foreign oil. Also, by creating an alternative energy powered vehicle, we aim to create a foundation on which future research can be done to reduce pollution associated with commuter traffic. This product may have the capability to appeal to a commercial market. Included in this market are college campuses, industrial environments, and city and state service departments, among other applications. This decision was reached by a team consensus.

In a team consensus, we want to do this project because it addresses a real world need, it will require a lot of work from everyone while providing great experience, and this is a great area for a project of this type.

We want to pursue this idea in order to improve the resources we have already. Improve them by updating the quality of the vehicles. Being able to complete the task to our best effort during the year is another reason we want to pursue this idea. Taking on a real world problem and putting our skills and knowledge together to find a solution will be a great experience for us to have before graduating and going out into the real world. Everyone in our group voted to go forward with this idea.

Energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly 1-seat watercraft demonstration vehicle

With the steady increase in recreational boating, the goal of decreasing America’s oil dependency, and the current efficiency and environmental deficiencies for watercraft, there is a need to make watercraft more environmentally-friendly and energy-efficient. To reach this goal, there is a need for a 1-seat demonstration watercraft that could fill a niche market and be used to demonstrate the technology to watercraft manufacturing companies. This scaled demonstration watercraft must be safe, energy efficient, environmentally friendly, and reliable while demonstrating appropriate speed, endurance, and payload capacity.

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Synopsis from teams 3, 4 and 6:

Our project is worth pursuing because it would provide us with an innovative engineering challenge that has not had much real world exposure. We believe we can provide something new to the table in terms of fuel efficiency and pollution control while being feasible and practical.

We decided that we wanted a focused learning experience, with small groups, something challenging, and different than what has been historically done with senior design. The eventual outcome of our review sessions came up with the idea of a small watercraft that integrates attention to being energy efficient, no matter what that energy may be. We have discussed alternative fuels, human power, electric, solar power, and a combination of any two or three with a focus being environmentally friendly. We came up with this idea by bouncing off one another of what we each individually want to get out of senior design and where our interests lie. After a few hours of collaboration the idea of a boat was brought up and we have fine tuned it to what we have stated today.

We propose the construction of an energy-appropriate boat that utilizes renewable energy. As we discovered, there is very little information about marine engine efficiency available on the internet. This project would develop awareness about the negative environmental effects of marine engines, as well as promote competition between the groups.

We as a team would like to address this need because there seems to be a lot of information on this problem and there appears to be feasible solutions that could be applied in a smaller scaled boat in our time frame.