From 2019 September until 2020 March, the ‘power’ team (consisting of Tse, Kailen and Egle) worked on researching, designing and testing alternative heating sources such as solar thermal power, and electricity.
Electricity
Electricity was added, because we wanted to find a way to make the plastic melting process more consistent. When firewood is used, there is a risk of reaching a higher temperature than wanted, making plastic burn and release dangerous chemicals such as sulphur dioxide, dioxins, furans and heavy metals, as well as particulates. By adding a PID controller to control process variables, it would have been possible to keep the temperature the plastic was melting at within allowable limits.
During winter we have designed some basic circuits consisting of nichrome wires, which were supposed to be wired around the kiln and heat up the plastic. We were supposed to build circuits and test them in the Engineering-department during the March-April holidays, however, Covid-19 had other plans.
On the other hand, when talking about electricity it is important to note, that electricity can only produce a certain amount of power. Based on our calculations, for the amount of plastic that we wanted to melt it would have taken more time than using firewood. Therefore we started researching how to combine electricity and solar energy.
Solar energy