A Senior Design Project in Automated Solar Heating System for Learning Green Energy Manufacturing

The paper presents a senior design project that engages in educational activities to enhance learning in green energy manufacturing, including construction of heat exchanging solar collector system and implementation in the efficient heating of a greenhouse. The goal of the senior design project was to engage students in real-world learning experiences for the design of a greenhouse module integrated with renewable energy as an initial stepping stone for the future construction of manufacturing plants in industry. The renewable energy integrator component in the project seeks to explore the technology of renewable and eco-friendly sources of electricity on a large scale. This design system is comprised of an evacuated tube and a flat panel solar collector both attached to a hot water tank heat exchanger for maximum efficiency. The students incorporated the green energy manufacturing concepts for the design of the control system to actively monitor soil temperatures with the use of a thermocouple sensor all the while maintaining ideal greenhouse conditions by pumping heated fluid through coils underneath the soil surface. The student learning outcome of this project was the successful incorporation of the solar collectors as the exclusive energy input required to heat the greenhouse system in order to decrease food manufacturing costs, expand the profitability of fruit and vegetable harvests, and decrease the environmental impact of greenhouse heating. For the sake of achieving the student learning outcomes, experiments were conducted, including sensor monitoring and process control. A concluding section discusses the student learning experiences during this project.