Building a team (with you?)

We are currently looking for students at the university of Freiburg, who want to join this wonderful project and write her/his master/bachelor thesis at our chair.

At the moment, we are still evaluating our last field experiment where we equipped three cashmere goats with a new version of our tracker. The results are very promising as we get 4 times more energy compared to our last tracker. But nevertheless this success, there is a lot of potential to improve:

The thermal connection is one of the fields, we want to put our focus on. As here, there is the chance to again lower the weight while improving the output power, we want to describe the thermal connection to the animal more closely and take our measured values of our field experiment into account. Additionally, we can maybe find a completely new design for a harvester that suits better to a collar. With a little bit creativity and learning some engineering skill with programs like Fusion360/SolidWorks, designs could be analysed with a simulation, while the rest of the team is preparing the next field experiment to validate the gathered results in the end.

While the first point is focusing on the energy income part, another small interesting task can be found in the electronics. As we clearly know the needed energy of our components and the input power with its variety, it becomes possible to think about an energy storage that perfectly fits for this special case. Considering losses and charge efficiencies of a storage and selecting a promising one may lead to a drastic increase of usable energy. I personally am excited about trying new concepts here like hybrid capacitors, as there is little information, but great chances that this could be a solution. Gathering information an making laboratory tests make this task ideal for a bachelor thesis.

If you are interested, you are welcome to contact us and read our official offers:

Of course, the list of tasks in this project does not end here, but we are not officially looking for help in other fields yet. As an example – there is still room for digging deeper into our GPS system, and with our new storage system, there is also the challenge to determine the power income and state of charge. But we’ll talk about these things in person if there are people that want to extend their field.

By the way – just because I am writing everything in englisch does not mean we can’t speak german.