December 2024 - ID 4206 Wayne Li
Interdisciplinary (ID/ ME) Capstone Design - ID 4081
Create an Agrivoltaic System for grape farmers in The West Bank, Palestine. Capstone project with Jemma Siegel, Jonathan Choi, Savannah Luney, Ciera Hudson, and Akash Chennuri.
Palestine's growing temperatures are decreasing the crop quality of vineyards in the West Bank. Meanwhile, most of their power is imported, and over 50% is reliant on Israel. We were able to design a solar panel shading system with vineyard families that generates over 65 KWH, providing economic security, and increasing crop quality by 30%.
My main contributions include leading a translation team with Palestine Polytechnic University, leading our user testing, creating a focused Value Proposition, and implementing it along with DFA and DFM principles into the final model.
Need-finding Phase
I created a journey map of the harvest cycle to determine opportunities for growth, as well as a shading and ripeing cycle to make sure our design fits within a system.
My ripening cycle findings showed us that most farmers only change the shade values on their vines twice in a harvest year.
Concept/ Prototype Development
This project was co-designed with 5 Palestine Polytechnic University renewable energy engineers: Lequa'a Awayssa, Yumna Allami, Saja Sharaha, Layan Al Herbawi, and Ibrahem Shrouf
I conducted a card sort with this team to help us gain quantitative and qualitative results on our farmer's priorities for a more human-centric design.
Along with Ceria Hudson, I created a 1/8 scale model to prototype and assess our DFA standards.
More to be added soon! Last updated 1/17/2025
