Week 3

We were able to find several mistakes with the previous designs and find solutions to them. We found that the tubes that were design had several problems. The tubes were too large for the collector shoes. The tubes were made from PVC pipes that are circular, which does not fit the collector shoes. The PVC pipes are too large for the collector shoes, which can cause slipping and lose contact with the copper railings.  In addition, we have to ensure that the copper rails are overlapped propperly at the junctions, where two sections of rail are joined together.  The copper has to be overlapped such that the collector shoe glides from a higher elevation to a lower elevation to avoid hitting against a rail.

The shoes must be touching the copper railings at all times. We were able to find a way to fix the problem. Instead of changing the tubing to rectangular shaped that will fit the collector shoes in the first place; we decided to redesign the collector shoes. Changing all the tubings and gluing all the copper railings will take weeks. We change increased the width of the collector shoes by adding more copper to the shoes. Making the shoes wider will increase being in contact with the railings. We added two copper strips to each side, which made the shoes wider as shown in Figure 1. The problem with that is getting stuck on a nail in the copper railing. We were able to design the shoes with a slight ramp that will go over the nails smoothly as shown in Figure 2.  This was simply done by cutting a small strip of copper and bending it before hot-gluing it at each end of the modified collector shoe to cover up the screws.  We glided each collector shoes across multiple screws on the power rails using more force than it will be subjected to, to ensuere that the hot glue is strong enough to hold the copper peice together.

Figure 1. Increased width in collector shoes            Figure 2. Final design on collector shoes