the university of Virginia has worked closely with the office of sustainability to come up with a clear and ambitious goal for the community's future sustainability plans, especially regarding renewable energy to deplete our carbon footprint in the atmosphere.

As stated on the sustainability office's main website to emphasize the efficiency of particularly solar energy,

"The amount of sunlight that hits the earth's surface every hour contains enough energy to power the whole planet for a year."

uva has already begun implementing solar energy into the framework of several of its buildings, such as the uvA Bookstore, Clemons Library, Ruffner Hall and Skipwith Hall. it is important to establish independence from fossil fuel-generated electricity and decrease our greenhouse gas emissions for not only our present planet but for future generations to come.

we wish to foster increased participation in sustainability-led movements and going-green practices by implementing solar powered charging stations throughout grounds, to not only assist students in remaining properly engaged in their studies, but also contribute to the larger advantageous phenomena of a cleaner, healthier planet.

the Castle was a highly requested place for charger implementation because it is a hot-spot for grabbing lunch on-the-go between classes or even on the way home after a long day. People not only come to eat but also to socialize and work on their assignments or catch up on readings in the great outdoors as opposed to being stifled in their rooms.

feedback

We received largely positive responses to our second, more targeted survey seeking feedback on our design. 77% of respondents studied outside at UVA at least occasionally and 86% of respondents sometimes needed to charge their devices while on Grounds. In addition, 100% of respondents said they would be willing to use the charging facility for 30 minutes or longer while eating or studying. This indicates that a large potential user base exists and that their needs match what our project could offer them without requiring them to significantly modify their habits.

complications of testing in the world of covid-19

At the beginning of the semester we would have been hard-pressed to predict the dramatic changes that would befall our world and this program due to COVID-19. It would have been easy to let this project fall by the wayside, but thanks to support from the program we were able to continue to plan for this project’s eventual implementation.

We ran into several unexpected challenges in our iterative design process post-Spring Break, the two most significant of which were our inabilities to monitor normal student usage of the Castle in person and create a physical prototype. We worked around these issues through an additional survey of students and more detailed computer modeling, but look forward to eventually returning to Grounds and working as originally planned.

improvements we could implement:

We made adjustments throughout the design process to continually improve our idea. Most significantly, we simplified our idea to two individual and customizable parts: the solar panel and the charging port. Other improvements include placing the cord within the umbrella pole rather than outside of it and using a circular charging port instead of a larger square one.

A future improvement we could implement would be the addition of a lock box. This gives students the option of securely locking their phones in a box near the charging port for a short period of time. Students could charge their phones during classes for a few hours using clean energy.

Another improvement would be implementing a solar panel battery into our design. Our current design of the solar charger only has the ability to charge electronics during the day when there is direct sunlight overhead. Thus, the charger's availability is limited by the sunlight. The addition of a battery to store excess charge would allow the charger to function regardless of the weather and time of day.