Ra Power: BYU Engineers Illuminate Remote Worksites with Solar Innovation
The BYU Capstone team "Ra Power," developed an off-grid mobile power solution for remote construction sites — a climate-controlled shipping container housing 12,500 watts of bi-facial solar panels and sufficient battery storage to power an average American home for over a day without sunlight.
“We all know that we play a critical part in the team,” Mechanical Engineering senior Joseph Morrell shared . “There’s elements of each of our areas of study that no one of us is able to do all on our own.”
Transcript
00:00:00 This is raw power. This is our team. This is our project. My name is Joseph Morell. I'm a mechanical engineering student at Brigham Young University working on uh our final capstone project. Um this is what we've been working on all semester. It's an off-grid power plant with a photovoltaic panels on the top with a raised mechanism to help it point
00:00:29 towards the sun. These are bfacial so it's able to get light from both sides and produce electricity. Um, and on the inside is a battery pack. So the idea is when the sun's out, we charge these panels or the panels charge the batteries and then we're able to lease this out to construction sites or mining operations and help them to power their equipment and provides a office space on
00:00:51 the inside as well for um for paperwork for management, whoever might be on site. My name is Zach Kitner. Um I own a a trucking company called Cedar Peak Trucking. And when we when we came to this yard where we're at now, we didn't have any power. And um I was interested in solar technology and was dabbling in it and decided just to build out um like a solar array for us so we could have
00:01:18 power here at the yard. So I I built two prototypes. This is the second prototype. Um, in doing so, I I kind of reached my limits, my limitations of what I'd be able to do on my own and reached out to the BYU um, school of engineering just to see if they had like students who were interested in um, maybe helping out on a real world project. And that's where I learned
00:01:44 about the capstone program. And then we were assigned a a team of engineers who who helped helped me really optimize some of the automations on the system and uh the lifting mechanism as well as the the full bill of materials uh everything to to be able to produce these uh these units in a in a better faster way. We're made up of eight students altogether. We have three
00:02:09 mechanical engineers, three electrical engineers, a computer engineer, and a manufacturing engineer. There's elements of each of our areas of study that no one of us is able to do all on our own. So, it's our collective ability to come together and have different parts of the project to work on. This unit is it's our first prototype that functions lifting with a electrical actuator. This
00:02:30 is a modified shipping container. It's got a a beautifully finished office climate controlled inside. Um all the electronics and um inverter and batteries you you could hope to have. There's about 50 kilowatt hours of battery storage in the unit, which would run the average American home for about a day and a half, just with with no sun incoming. We've got 12,500 watts of
00:02:56 bfacial solar panels on the unit. As you saw, they're they're layered. So, when fully extended and tilted up, we we generate right around 12,000 um 12,000 watts of electricity. I think one of the biggest engineering takeaways for we the students for this project has been um the camaraderie, the teamwork and the unity that we've been able to have as a team. Definitely I think what's helped
00:03:21 us be as effective as we are is that um we're all good humored. We're good naturatured. We all know that we play a critical part in the team and that's been a huge plus. We're uh we laugh when we're working. We're able to get serious and focus. When we have a deadline, we're all working towards it together. Um, that's helped us be a lot more effective and it's helped us build a
00:03:40 good relationship with our sponsor. Uh, the experience has been amazing for me that the team has been awesome. Super responsive. Um just great great team to work with and they've really nailed the deliverables that we've we've asked them to do.