Back to work…

After the excitement of being in Sweden, the last couple of weeks have been fairly boring. Work has been mainly consisted of testing, I've been doing a more accurate test regime, looking at the extremes of all my variables to see which are most important and which may affect the efficiency of the turbine most. To do this, I've had to modify the rig slightly, so I can more accurately measure and move angles and positions. I've a series of 12 tests to do now, which will map out the combination of variables that is most important. This should be finished in the next week hopefully…

I've also been getting further frustrated by the analytical modelling. I still seem to unable to model it using the different physical effects that are quantifiable. I've tried another method over the last couple of weeks, using the cup as the stationary coordinate system and sweeping a stream of water particles in and out, but that still brings up inconsistencies which I really can't get my head around. I think the only option I really have open to me now is use experimentally derived constants to match the theory with the experiments. Definitely not ideal and not really what I wanted to do, but I will do this so that I can have a model to progress on to the next stage and then try again later to derive the whole thing from geometry and fluid mechanic equations.

I've also been looking at the electrical side of the project a little more. At WREC I met someone who presented a paper on parallel connected inverters and he gave me some pointers about how to model these types of systems, so I've done a lot of reading on these and the concept of virtual impedance control schemes for inverters.

On the more fun side of things, I've been getting ready for another musical, this time Sweet Charity with Bristol Musical Comedy Club (BMCC). This is the first time for a long time I've worked with a new company, which is fun, although getting to know how different people do things is quite hard at first. BMCC don't have a parish hall that they're based in, so perform in professional theatres, this time it's the Redgrave Theatre. This is going to be another new experience for me, setting up and working in a proper professional theatre. I've spent the last few weeks visiting the rehearsals and building some of the set, which has been good fun - I enjoy getting my hands dirty, it makes sitting at a computer for the rest of the day more bearable.

I went down to Cornwall for a few days for my Mum's birthday, which was great. I really haven't visited home as much as I should have over the last few months, so it was fantastic for all my family to be in one place again.

Mum and her birthday cake (don't count the candles!)

The next few weeks are going to be fairly hectic I think. Alongside all the work I'm doing at uni, I'm off to Paris for my friend's 'this-isn't-a stag-party-it's-more-of-a-pre-wedding-bash', then there's the performance of Sweet Charity in the first week of June, straight after coming back from Paris, then after a week's rest and relaxation, I'm off to Nepal for a short visit to go to Rachhu's wedding before returning for three weeks and then back to Nepal for my annual month-long trip. I've got to try and wrap up all the turbine work before I head away as they're going to be doing some modifications in the Hydrolab, which is annoying. Finger's crossed it all goes well!

SAM

World Renewable Energy Congress

I've just got back from the World Renewable Energy Congress in Linköping, Sweden. I have to say, it didn't start particularly well. I thought I had printed everything I needed to, but found I hadn't so on the Saturday morning had to go back into the office and print out my ticket. That was where I noticed that my flight was in fact 3 hours earlier than I thought it was going to be. Dope. Then, in the evening, Hannah pointed out that I was coming back on the Saturday instead of the Friday I thought I was. Not a great start.

The aircraft lined up in Schiphol airport, Amsterdam (for those aircraft spotters I flew on a KLM cityhopper Fokker 70)

However, I got to Linköping and after an extortionate taxi ride of nearly £18 for just a 5 minute ride I found my hotel and collapsed on the bed as it was almost midnight. However, I forgot that Sweden is very far north. So far north in fact that the sun rose around 3am. Argh. I'm never very good at sleeping when the sun is up. I headed the next morning for the conference centre. Looking at the map I had been given, I thought it was a good 30 minute walk, however, it was only 10 minute walk. Apparently I walked through the city centre as well, it was quite small but very clean, green and friendly.

The conference centre, with the conference banner outside

I registered and received my obligatory bag which was really rather ugly - a black laptop case with a orange flap. I had looked at the program for the talks during my stop-over in Amsterdam and so worked out what I was going to do for the first day at least. I went into the main hall to get a seat for the opening presentations. There, was a long haired man playing a violin type instrument on its side. It was really quite pleasant folk music and relaxed me. The conference began with the entrance of Princess Victoria, the Crown Princess of Sweden. Then there were several really interesting talks from some high level politicians and policy makers. The most memorable for me was from Alan AtKisson who was advocating that the richest 10% of the world should donate $100 a month to provide the investment for environmental projects that would keep global warming within a 2 degree temperature rise. It gave me a lot to think about - would I donate £60 to save the world? Would you?

A man playing some Swedish Folk Music

A blurry shot of the Swedish Crown Princess (the one with the red circle around her)

For the next few days I attended several talks - ranging from wave and tidal generators to photovoltaics, energy efficiency to policy issues. Julian, one of my supervisors, was presenting a paper on powering rope pumps using renewable energy. It was a final year research project he had supervised and was now being implemented in Tanzania. For me, these type of talks were the most interesting, those that were more than just an academic exercise.

Julian presenting about rope pumps

On the third day of the conference there were industrial visits we could go on to local projects and plants. I went to a Tekniska Verken site that incinerated waste and provided electricity and heat for Linköping and the surrounding villages. It was really interesting to see what Swedes did, how they provided district heating so people didn't need individual boilers in their houses. It seemed a really good solution to some tricky problems. I also visited the Linköping Biogas site, where they were producing biogas from the local sewage works and food waste. This was used then to give compressed natural gas - methane - for cars. I really enjoyed listening to how the Swedes were dealing with the environmental issues that were facing the planet. By 2030, they hope that all of Sweden will be totally renewable, quite a challenge, but they seem to be well on the way.

Tekniska Verken Incinerator plant

Linköping Biogas Anaerobic Digesters

The next day was my presentation. I had spent the previous night practising, and I had it down to 12 minutes. However, when I started I found it taking a lot longer. By the time I was half way through the talk, my time was almost up. So, I rushed through the last few slides, focussing on the testing that we are doing currently. I had some questions on the efficiency, the size, but none were that taxing or trying to catch me out, which was great. I sat through the other hydropower presentations, breathed a sigh of relief that mine was all over. After our session had finished, I started to chat with several people that had been listening and presenting. I found that there were several people that were interested in the technology we were developing. I hope that some of the contacts I've made will be useful, and I can be useful to them, in the future.

Presenting at WREC

The final days were great and relaxing. In all I went to 47 presentations and many keynote talks from experts, policy makers and industrialists and made a large number of really good contacts.

Lawrence Kazmerski from NREL talking about PV with a US Army Mobile PV panel

As I had an extra day in Linköping I decided to explore. I went to the museum just next to the conference centre which showed Swedish life a few hundred years ago. The highlight of the museum for me was the chance to try on an old warrior helmet, I felt just like a Rohan warrior!

Me in a Rohan-esque helmet (notice how big the williamson nose looks...)

Here are a few more photos from around Linköping:

The cathedral

Gamla Linköping (old Linköping)

Rowing along the canal

Eating an ice-cream outside the cathedral in Linköping

I had a great time at the conference, it was fantastic to talk to people and find that they'd been coming across similar problems to me. Sweden was a very beautiful and relaxing place. The journey home was a lot less eventful than the one out fortunately.

Flying over Sweden

SAM

Sweden Bound

So, WREC starts tomorrow, so I've been preparing my presentation over the last week. As I've been doing the living below the line challenge I've not been the most happy and smiley person this week, the lack of food has made me slightly more grumpy than normal (many would say this is a great feat as I'm fairly grumpy most of the time anyway!) and so the pressure to get a good and coherent presentation together hasn't helped the situation. However, after a couple of iterations during the week and a practise on Friday I'm quite happy with what I have. I'm going to be giving my presentation in the first hydropower session of the conference on Thursday morning, which means I'll have most of the week to see how everyone else does theirs and see what the style and level of the presentations are. I've also been thinking about the awkward questions that I'm likely to be asked so that I can have useful responses to them. The questions I think most likely are:

- Why don't people normally use these turbines at low head as they're not new technology?

- How big will the turbine be?

- What is the advantage of this compared with the axial flow turbine (the normal turbine used at low head pico ranges)?

- What about using pumps as turbines?

I've also learnt a bit more about what you need to do in a conference to present your work. You don't necessarily need to give all the data that's in the paper, in fact you can give more data than the paper and any new information that you've learnt. I thought I'd be able to only present what I'd initially written and so focussed my presentation on that, however I've been told that people aren't that interested in that, more what you're doing now and what you're going to be doing. Let's see how it goes…

As well as preparing for the conference I've been doing some further testing on the turbine. I've a new nozzle - 20mm diameter jet, which produced a fantastic 85% efficiency on the turbine. I have to say I breathed a sigh of relief. I was beginning to get concerned that my turbine choice I had made was fundamentally wrong. So the good efficiency measure is great news. Now we have to go forward with a organised testing regime, covering all the possible variables in the design - jet velocity (head, flow rate), jet inclination angle, jet impact location and so on - and see what affects the efficiency most, finding the optimum location. I'm still struggling with matching my model to the results - when I reached 85% the model was fairly close, within a reasonable error, but when the turbine moves away from this optimum point then this consistency with the model drops away dramatically.

So, to combat some of the problems with the model, I've been looking at further improvements, trying to implement some sort of 3D flow in the cup, as I've seen in the experiments that it is certainly not two dimensional flow. To see this yourself, if you put a spoon under a tap, as pictured below, you can see that the flow goes in all directions. This also happens in the turbine. However, form initial runs of this model, it doesn't seem to solve the problem, so I think I may have to come up with a completely new strategy. More frustration definitely!

Spoon and turgo cup under a 'jet' from a tap - see how the flow goes pretty much everywhere!

I've also been looking at some of the electrical building blocks I'll need to use in my system. Firstly the phase locked loop controller, that is used to synchronise two AC signals together. Once this was done, then I used it to control two independent voltage sources to parallel them up - replicating two generators connected together. I've managed to synchronise two units together - as you can see on the graph below:

Trying to synchronise two AC generators

Two problems have appeared though. The time to synchronise is quite long, about half a second, which is not really acceptable. There is also a 100Hz ripple in the frequency, as you can see the line is not at a constant frequency. This would not cause a big problem, but is annoying. I've tried filtering this out, but this causes a slow reaction in the control of the sources. So, these are a couple of problems to overcome.

I've bought my tickets to return to Nepal in July, which I'm really looking forward to. It's been almost a year since I was there last, and I can't wait to see all my friends again and just relax back into the wonderful culture and lifestyle that the Nepali's have. I met up with Tim Mitchell, a member of the Rotary club (Rotary Club) who does a lot of work with the Pahar Trust. The Pahar Trust are an NGO that build schools and medical posts in rural Nepal. They are also interested in electrifying them, and so after the IMechE presentation in March he came to talk to me about using the technology we're looking at to provide power to their schools. This is quite exciting as it could provide the possibility of test sites at the end of the project. So, I'm going to try and meet up with the Project Manager of the Pahar Trust when I'm out in Nepal, and maybe visit some of their projects.

I went home for Easter, as it had been a long time since I had been back to Cornwall. It was great to see my parents again, and Mary came down from up north for a few days, so all the family were together, quite a rare occasion. Hannah and I also decided to take a few days off on May Day bank holiday weekend, as we weren't that keen on watching THE wedding. So we booked a cottage just outside Abergavenny and plotted a weekend of walking, cycling (my choices) and shopping (Hannah's choice). We went to Brecon and found the Nepali shop there - I wanted to buy something, so bought some chiura and muri. Not very exciting, but still necessary. We went walking around the black mountains and climbed Sugar Loaf, which was blowing a gale on the top.

Climbing up sugar loaf

Near our house was Llanthony Priory which was destroyed in the dissolution of the monasteries in the mid 16th century. It was a very beautiful place to sit and relax, and quite interesting as I'd been reading some books about the dissolution period of British History.

Llanthony Priory

We cycled up the valley we were staying in up to the pass. Doing this we climbed over 300m, which almost killed both of us - I think I definitely need to improve on my fitness. But we had a really good picnic at the top of the pass, and then freewheeled most of the way back down the valley in 45 minutes, when it took us almost 3 hours to cycle up it!

The road to the pass - very very very tiring to reach it, so much quicker to go back down!

On the final day we went for a cycle on the Brecon Monmouth canal, much easier to cycle along and a nice relaxing time. We didn't want to expend too much energy though as we were starting to live below the line at that point, so we wouldn't be able to replace any lost calories with excesses of chocolate, as normal.

So, now I'm just about to head off to Sweden for my first conference. I'm nervous as anything, but looking forward to it too. Sort of!

SAM

Living Below the Line - Some Final Thoughts…

So, this morning we all celebrated by having a fry-up at 7.45am. After 5 days of eating vegetables, pulses and pasta, it was brilliant to be able to eat something with more taste! I was so looking forward to eating that when the food sat in front of me I gobbled it down within just a couple of minutes. I developed a proper food-baby in front of me. However, now it is the afternoon, and I've not actually had to eat anything else so far today, and I doubt I will until tea. So, maybe the reduced portions have done me some good. I just need to learn to not be so greedy I think.

I woke up very early this morning (too excited about the cooked breakfast I think) and started thinking. I could now buy food for a day that costs £1. What other things could I buy for a pound (or thereabouts)? Here's a few interesting things...

• You can get a three-stop-hop on the buses here in Bristol

• You can buy Help! by The Beatles on iTunes

• You can buy 2 first class stamps and have a little change left over (get some penny sweets in!)

• You can buy some posh and very tasty cookies from Tesco (only if they're on offer though…)

• You can buy a lottery ticket, with a 14,000,000 to 1 chance of winning large amounts of money

• You can buy a fluorescent tube

• You could call Nepal for 5 minutes or send 10 texts there

• You could subscribe to The Times online for 24 hours

• Or you could feed yourself

It seems to me that in this world today we don't really realise how much £1 can actually do. It can actually make the difference between eating or not, even in this country. Maybe, I'll make one less bus journey a week, buy one less track from iTunes, not eat so many Tesco/Sainsburys/Coop cookies. Then with that money put it to something that can actually make a difference.

£1 a day = £365 a year. That would make a HUGE difference.

SAM

Living Below the Line - Day 5

It's amazing how not hungry you get when you're busy. Today, I had to go into uni early to re-write the presentation for WREC. I sat there concentrating so hard, that by the time I noticed the time it was 12.30.

Lunch was chickpea, cauliflower and chapatti. It tasted good, the chapattis were fantastic, but still a bit dry.

Lunch - Chickpea, cauliflower and chapatti

This afternoon I did a run through of the presentation to my research group. It went quite well, most comments were quite positive and constructive. I went home and showered, just felt really dirty, before getting the last night's tea ready. It was cheese (with some pasta and other bits). That was really exciting.

The cheese

The food was the best we had all week. What a shame it had to be on Friday…

Tea - Cheese with pasta and vegetables in a tomato sauce

I am very happy to be finishing the challenge, looking forward to some cake and the fry up tomorrow morning. Now I just have to work out how to follow this week up…

SAM

Living Below the Line - Day 4

Today was hard. Not only did my presentation for my first ever conference get ripped apart - probably quite rightly - by my supervisors which means I'm gong to have to spend all of tomorrow re-doing it (ARGH!) but the snacking pangs are coming on stronger and stronger. I'm getting more and more grumpy and looking forward to the weekend, when this will be all over.

And then that thought makes me feel sad and very very humble. Why? Because, as I said at the beginning, I am just playing at this. It is not my real life, eating a small amount of food and trying to get by, it's just a game for me, a choice that I have made, a challenge I've given myself. However, for 1.4 billion people who live in extreme poverty, they don't have the chance to eat more on Saturday. Or Sunday. Or maybe ever. I feel very thankful for everything I've got and the opportunities that are afforded to me.

However, any tinge of guilt will probably not be felt during the cooked breakfast I'm planning for Saturday morning!

Today's food was a repeat of Tuesdays. Breakfast was porridge again, today i cooked it at uni, and hoped that it wouldn't boil over. But it did. Which meant I had to clean out the microwave at uni (a rather disgusting job) and had less than planned porridge.

Breakfast - Porridge (boiled over once again)

Lunch was leek and potato soup with chapatti. I thought it tasted a lot better than Tuesdays, but then it may have been because I was really hungry, not being able to eat until 3pm.

Lunch - Very tasty Leek and Potato Soup (Note the black chapatti from very burnt flour…)

The afternoon, spent modifying my presentation was almost too much. I left my office late, and rushed back to get some tea. However on the way home I started to get a headache, and then feel slightly light headed, so walked a bit slower. Tea was fried rice with vegetables, not as good as Tuesdays, but definitely hit the spot.

Tea - Fried Rice and Vegetables

So, tomorrow is the last day. I'll be sad to stop - I'm sure the weight I want to lose for the summer would just fall off with this sort of diet - but I feel that if I went on for too much longer I'd burn up in a ball of wrath…

SAM

Living Below the Line - Day 3

Halfway through the week today. It's not been as hard as yesterday was, I haven't had to battle as much with temptation until after lunch when there were a load of trays of free food from a meeting. That was a bit tough.

Breakfast was porridge again, and once again it tried to empty itself all over the microwave, but I just about managed to save it, and scraped it all back into the bowl.

Breakfast - Porridge

I spent most of the morning working on my turbine rig in uni (see here) adding a few extra functionalities to it, to allow it to more completely cover the speed range I'm interested in. This meant wiring up a switch to allow it to short circuit the generator and open circuit the generator. This allowed me to distract myself from the thought of food until lunchtime. Lunch, again, was chickpea and cauliflower, with chapattis (I forgot to take a photo, so here's the one from Monday).

Lunch - Chickpea, cauliflower and chapatti

The afternoon did drag a bit more. I was writing notes to accompany my presentation for the World Renewable Energy Congress Conference next week. Then, later on in the afternoon I attended some undergraduate presentations on low carbon technologies. Some were good, some were not so, but all gave something to think about. Tea was jacket potato and vegetables in tomato sauce, which had a strange after-taste to it, but not in a completely bad way.

Tea - Jacket potato with vegetables in tomato sauce

After tea, I cooked some chapatti with Hannah for tomorrow's lunch. We're just over half way through now and I'm getting in to it a bit more. I am hungry, and struggling a little with temptation - a piece of cake would be great now - but overall it's going OK. Tomorrow is another day though!

SAM

Living Below the Line - Day 2

Today has been a bit tricky. I was back in to work, and struggled to resist the mid-afternoon trip to the chocolate machine. I did though!

I woke up shortly after 5am. My stomach was rumbling. Not a good sign. I went into uni as early as I could to stave off any temptation in eating early. I returned from uni at 11am to meet Mel who is off to Nepal (JEALOUS!) and to have some breakfast - porridge again. This morning's porridge was a bit of a disaster. After yesterday's slightly stodgy effort - all my fault for guessing the wrong amount of water - today I added too much water and it boiled over. Dope. Half of the porridge was in the microwave, which left me even more hungry.

Breakfast - Porridge that boiled over (it wasn't really that green!)

Lunch was made yesterday, so to my office I took one pint of potato and leek soup. After giving it a taste test yesterday, it was fairly boring and bland - no vegetable stock - so I wasn't necessarily enthralled by the prospect of eating it. But with the chapatti it actually tasted very good.

Lunch - Potato and Leek soup with Chapatti

In the afternoon, my will was tested quite hard. I felt the hunger starting to kick in, especially as the work I was doing at the time, writing a presentation for a conference next week, got into the really nit-picking phase of making sure that everything looked the same. I felt the call of the chocolate machine. Then, I headed into Bristol to meet up with my housegroup from Church for a round of crazy golf. On the way through the city centre I passed hundreds of fast food restaurants selling all kinds of greasy and horrible but amazing smelling foods. Kebab shops, KFC, McDonalds, they were all there. When I reached the crazy golf course, Hannah was there with tea. She had promised me it was the best meal we'd had so far - fried rice with vegetables. And I have to admit, she probably was right.

Tea - Fried Rice with Vegetables (I was so hungry I ate some of it before remembering to photograph it…)

This is turning out to be more tricky than I thought. It's not the hunger. I've dealt with hunger before - my calorie counting days of my early twenties are still in recent memory. It's not the blandness of the food. My learning-to-cook-for-myself years of 18-23 were a series of bland meal after bland meal, the only excitement being a takeaway when I could afford it. It's not the lack of caffeine. I despise tea and coffee, so my caffeine intake is fairly small anyway. The biggest problem is the temptation, trying to resist when I know there's money in my pocket that would get rid of the feeling immediately.

Let's see how tomorrow goes…

SAM

Living Below the Line - Day 1

This morning we made the chapatti for lunch before cooking the porridge. The chapatti proved to be quite tricky, especially rolling out, as our cottage didn't have a rolling pin, so instead I used a glass. Most of them cooked OK, and some puffed up slightly. I had forgot what the water to porridge ratio should be, and so had a guess, which turned out to be wrong. After 2 minutes in the microwave, the porridge had the consistency of a flapjack. However, Hannah managed to save it, adding more water and by the time it came to eating it porridge came out satisfactorily.

Breakfast - Porridge (made with water not milk)

We left our holiday cottage and headed into Abergavenny for a cycle along the Brecon-Monmouth Canal before heading back to Bristol for lunch. It was quite dry but I enjoyed it, very much like some of the khaja I eat whilst in Nepal.

Lunch - Chickpea and Cauliflower Curry with Chapatti

After lunch Hannah, I and Becky prepared some of the food for the rest of the week. I made 36 chapatti (some for the next couple of days) whilst the girls made the leek and potato soup for tomorrow, which I now have a pint of in my fridge. Tea was to be jacket potato and vegetables in a tomato sauce. The jacket potatoes were disappointingly small, but the vegetables made up for it and had a good amount of taste to it, made even more so when we added some garlic (an extra 1/2 a clove per person, about 1p).

Tea - Jacket Potato With vegetables in a Tomato Sauce

Day one is over now. It was surprising how much we talked about food, considering it's something that we can't have any more. I am in need of a little chocolate though…

SAM

Living Below the Line - The Day Before…

So, tomorrow starts the living below the line challenge. I'm quite glad it's here as I've been thinking about it for a while now and really want to get going.

I'm really glad I won't be the only one doing this, it's always fun to have others going through the same pain and misery as you. When Hannah said she would do it, I was really happy, when she said she had managed to convince her family to do it as well I was amazed. So, we're all going to be surviving on £1 a day each for food, trying to battle hungriness, temptation and grumpiness together.

I'm on holiday in the Black Mountains at the moment, going back home tomorrow, so will have to eat the low cost breakfast (porridge) and lunch (chickpea, cauliflower and chapatti) here.

We still had a stack of food left last night so instead of going out, as we had planned, we stayed in and ate the remaining food. It seemed slightly silly if we were going to be trying to live frugally for a week if we started by throwing away a load of food. So, we had a mish mash of salad, boiled potatoes, crisps and cake. It was very good although I seemed to eat a surprisingly large amount of salad leaves...

I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Who know's what will happen!

SAM