Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My name is Connor and I have been enrolled in an advanced engineering course since mid January. The entire class revolves around the principle of creating a product based upon a problem in the real world. I decided to tackle one of the largest issues in the world, abundance of clean water. After weeks of research, I discovered that there are large freshwater aquifers in Africa and decided to take an advantage of these. Since there is no electricity in the vast majority of Africa, I decided to make a self reliant, solar powered bilge pump with a solar tracker equipped. The reason I am posting on this forum is because for this project I need an "expert". All I need from my expert is suggestions and advice for improvement in my design. I appreciate all help on any level of expertise, the more knowledge you have on the subject whether it is knowledge of electronics, the earth, or solar energy, all help is sincerely appreciated! Reply if you have questions, comments, or need more details!

If you would like to see my Portfolio please reply and I can allow you to view it.

Connor-

I think you had asked about this a little while ago and we exchanged a few idea. Unfortunately we don't permit exchange of personal contact information here, so no one can post a personal email address. That's a problem for these invitation-based systems. Someone else asked about that and I said they could have the system (they were on InnovationPortal) email my Science Buddies address as long as they didn't send anything except for the link. That seemed to work fine. I'd be happy to comment if your arrangement is similar - my email address at Science Buddies is 'howard' at the Science Buddies domain (in the URL for the forum, for example). I can't just spell it out because I don't want to expose it to spammers. If you can have the site send a link without personal contact info to that address, that would be fine.

Howard

Thank you Howard, I invited you to my Portfolio through your email. If you could generally review it and make suggestions or comments in another comment on this forum. Thank you for your time Howard!

Connor-

I saw the invitation, thank you. I'll read through it and comment on it perhaps tomorrow.

Howard

Connor-

I went through your design document and commented on the site. If you can't see what I wrote, I
ll copy and paste it here. In essence, I'm impressed with how well you sized your components based on the specifications and then went about testing things to see if they worked as designed.

You may need to consider adding some filtering to keep small rocks and sand from damaging the pump, I don't see much mention of how the local town will know there's a problem (does it alert somehow? If the town is one that has some wireless service, can your device use it?) and I'm not convinced that the added complexity of the solar tracker will pay off. If you saved the cost of adding it, could you make the solar array bigger and simply get more power to pump more water?

You also build in efficiencies in your calculations which may not be relevant. The manufacturer does factor those in - on batteries for example, a 5AH battery properly charged can actually deliver 5AH.

In all, a nice presentation. You didn't discuss the details of how you'd test this but I imagine you have something in mind. I hope to hear more about it. Good luck with your project!

Howard

Thank you so much for your extensive review, the review and suggestions were very helpful! Thank you again Howard for your help, time and suggestions!!
Connor