Solar Panel Car Roof Rack

My Senior Design Capstone Project was sponsored by Porsche. Four teams of four worked towards designing, manufacturing and testing a removable roof rack system and solar panels that could normalize to the sun’s position and were integrated to the car’s battery. The design was specific to a Volkswagen e-Golf provided. I worked on the team responsible for the roof rack: an aerodynamic housing for the solar panels and normalization system as well as a safe, secure and removable attachment to the car.

This project required consistent communication between the four teams throughout the three months we worked, as we each engineered a part of a larger system, which interacted in many levels. As the head of communication for my team, I was responsible for ensuring our designs were up to date with the other teams' decisions and developments guaranteeing our different parts came together and interacted in the way we desired.

Lessons Learned

This project required us to use manufacturers outside of Stanford to make parts for our final prototype. This was because of the organic shapes of the cuts required for the aerodynamic roof rack we had designed couldn't be accomplished at our shop due to the size of the parts and the equipment we had available (namely, we didn't have access to a water jet cutter). The interaction with these manufacturers required very precise communication to ensure that the parts they delivered were in line with the specifications we had designed to. The biggest lesson I learnt here was to trust but verify. I trust that the manufacturer is capable of delivering what I want. But I need to verify what their process is and if what their understanding of what our specs are is the same as ours. With this project I failed to verify with one of our vendors, we were using multiple facilities to cut different parts because no one place had the bandwidth to do all our cuts, and we received parts that had a scaling issue. Our process had worked with other vendors and we assumed that it would work again. This was our biggest mistake and because of it we were delivered parts we couldn't use.