Fin MacDonald

Each year NSCC puts out Success Magazine to publicize recent projects among students and staff. This year a project involving our lab was selected for printing! Dr. Alain Joseph who heads the Applied Energy Research Lab obtained a grant through NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada) to work to improve the performance of solar energy systems in Atlantic Canada. Dr. Joseph hired 8 students to help with the project over the course of the year. Travis Keeping from the Electrical Engineering Technology program and his instructor Gord Wilkie helped design a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) to monitor solar hot water. The monitoring system was deployed in industry and will provide clues to the availability of solar energy in our climate. Since I came on late in the project my work involved examining low cost alternatives to the PLC system. My work using the Web Energy Logger (WEL) was based around trying to provide the same information as the PLC system. I believe it is important to have low cost alternatives because not every system is big enough to warrant the expense of PLCs which can be in the range of thousands of dollars. We are currently deploying both a PLC system and a low cost WEL on the solar equipment on the roof of the Waterfront Campus.

I have attached a scan of the article here.