Last year, the High School environmental club used $5,000 it had raised and saved, along with an additional $5,000 in matching funds from the Shaker Schools Foundation to purchase and install 10 solar panels on the High School roof. The idea was to generate solar energy to help reduce the High School’s carbon footprint.
Then this fall, Engineering Applications teachers Joe Marencik and Ben Turner, along with Environmental Science teacher Jeanne Wiemer, realized the solar panels are also generating data that the Engineering Applications students can use in calculations for class. More specifically, it’s helping students calculate how much solar power is available to cook food in a solar oven.
“The solar panels really started as a project where we wanted to get kickbacks to the school for energy reduction, but then we realized that the environmental club had all this data being collected by the panels,” says Dr. Marencik. “So, for our solar oven project, the students have to know how much solar energy is coming into the oven and how much is converted to heating the food in a certain time period. The input energy at that moment comes from the solar panels and the output energy comes from taking temperature data which allows them to determine the efficiency of their solar ovens.”
In the past, the students had been using generic website data in their calculations. But this year, Dr. Marencik and Mr. Turner measured the square footage of the solar panels and noted the wattage generated by them.
“We needed the watts per meter squared, which is called ‘solar irradiance,’ for our efficiency calculations of our solar ovens,” Dr. Marencik says. “The students were like, ‘wait...we can get this data right now?’”
What would have taken both teachers a half-period (at least) previously is now instantly available.
“It’s just a nice application of the panels,” says Dr. Marencik. “It’s great that we’ve got these panels up there and that we can actually use them for scientific data.”