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Solar Splash 2009: Zelectric Winner of the coveted "Best Technical Report!"

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I have led the Elizabethtown College Solar Boat Team for the past 2 years. This past May our team competed in the international intercollegiate solar boat competition, SOLAR SPLASH.

Withholding the great success of building what we believe to be the most commercially viable solar-electric boat in Solar Splash history, we also were recognized for the great efforts we paid to our technical report (see picture of rankings, 90 out of 90, perfect score). It has been a great honor to have such an exemplary team of committed, smart individuals to work with. I thank you, Team Zelectric, for your dedication, drive, long work days, and the great times.

I was the chief author and architect of this year's technical report. Of course nothing is possible without help, a special thanks goes to Tim Iezzi, Mike Patrick, Dr. Troy McBride, and Dr. Kurt DeGoede. You can download the report here: Elizabethtown College Technical Report. This file is huge (12.5 MB) and may take sometime to download, but well worth it!

Senior Project: Personal Transport UnitWinner of Senior Project of the Year 2009!

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Dan Lappin and I began a joint senior project in Fall 2008. We settled on the problem of energy efficient transportation:

From our Design Paper: "... The Personal Transport Unit (or PTU) is a parameter based design that was developed to meet the demands of local, personal transportation. It represents one of many possible ideas that could help progress us towards establishing a sustainable future. By redefining and eliminating certain criteria used in modern day automobile production, the PTU looks to offer a different solution to the problems presented by our current transportation infrastructure. Specifically, it is intended to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels while pioneering a new way to look at local travel..."

"...First and foremost, it was our mission to design a vehicle that would adequately met the demands of local transportation. By eliminating the necessity to be highway-capable from the transportation equation we were able to free ourselves from design extremes and develop the best solution for efficient, local, personal travel. Conversely, we regarded other criteria such as comfort, efficiency, and simplicity as being of greater importance. With these methods we believe one could develop an innovative take on transportation vehicles..."

At the conclusion of Fall 2008 we submitted our final Design Paper [PDF]. This paper outlines the project, our design process, and details our final designs.