This cutting edge design process began at the beginning of the 2018 fall semester. Myself, along with Jake Burke, came up with a way to make sports benefit the environment. We got our inspiration for this design after coming across some sports facilities around the world that go green for the environment. Specifically, in Rio de Janeiro, there is an athletic field that uses kinetic tiles underneath the turf that generates power for the field lights and the in the city itself. This design caught our eye and we knew that this idea could work for Norwich and for the town of Northfield, Vermont. We spent weeks on figuring out how this design could help the Norwich community. The kinetic tiles would be installed underneath the turf on Sabine Field and power would be generated by all the athletes using the field every day. This is an efficient way of generating power and if the students knew they would be powering the school and community it would draw more students to want to work out on Sabine Field. After doing some research, Jake Burke and I found out how much power actually could be generated by all the athletic teams that use the field in the fall and the spring. It would generate an enormous amount of power because the field is used every single day during those seasons. We’ve spent weeks throughout the semester developing our website for our “company” that we call ‘Gridiron Green Gang.’ We came up with that name mainly because a football field is called a gridiron and we simply want to make it green by helping the environment. We created a model to help easily explain our idea in a simple way. After exploring the internet, we found a way to design this model. It is quite simple. Two cardboard pieces are used and they are wrapped in tin foil. Then we used some masking tape to keep it together and to make sure the current can flow through the tin foil. We reached out to an electrical engineering student named Andrew McGowan. We needed a circuit to be connected to a battery and some wire to the tin foil. With some pressure being applied to the two wires after they touch would generate power into turning on a light bulb. Our model looks like a small football field and when pressure is applied onto the model, power is generated into turning on the light. This is a small representation of how kinetic tiles will be used on Sabine field and will help produce power for Norwich University and for Northfield, Vermont. Many hours were put in each week to develop a quality website that helps portray our central message which is to make sports help the environment. The Gridiron Green Gang expended a lot of time in order to progress this design into what it is today. The model is a small demonstration of what could be the future of athletic fields across the nation and the globe.
Comments