Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Solar energy is becoming more economical every year. Its application and ROI in remote and hard to reachareas is also rising dramatically. Despite this, we see a hesitance to engage and deploy a solar system due tolack of expertise in system design and fear of the perceived complexity of solar systems.Solar systems are, in fact, very simple in concept; the challenge is in sizing/designing a system and the actualinstallation procedure. There are normally a number of separate components that need to be assembled andinterfaced to make a solar system work. The core components are: a. solar panels; b. batteries; c. solar chargecontroller.Typically, the batteries and solar charger are housed in a junction box with wires leading to the solar panel.Sometimes the junction box is needed to protect the powered device, but very often the device being poweredis weather rated and makes no use of the weather rated enclosure. Examples of this are WiFi/cellular radios,cameras, sensors, lighting fixture, and many more.Sheridan College and Stinson Owl-Lite Traffic and Infrastructure solutions are proposing to collaborate on thedesign, fabrication, and field trial of a weather-proof compact solar system for field equipment. Thespecifications needed, as well as the designs of the initial solar systems, will be provided by Stinson. Theoptimization, fabrication, and integration will be conducted by the Sheridan College School of Mechanical andElectrical Engineering Technology research team at the Centre for Advanced Manufacturing and DesignTechnologies in Brampton, Ontario.