Personal Profiles and Roles
John Ewing - Construction Leader
In order for the project to progress effectively a notable effort has been made to structure the working process via planning and group organisation. Group roles have been assigned on the basis of personal strengths and to allow each member a project area to manage. The informtion below shows each group members area of ownership and discusses some of their major contributions to the project.
Francis Head - Communications Leader
Laura McLean - Procurement and Budget Leader
Magnus Johnson - Organisation Leader
Kenta Nakamura – Design Verification Leader
Jamie McMorran - Experimental Analysis Leader
My main role as the construction leader within this project was to ensure the successful building of the overall system. This involved managing the various tasks that needed to be carried out during the build sequence. In order to ensure that the system met the required specifications for aspects such as safety, quality and operations - Installational and Operational qualifications (IQ's/OQ's) were developed. These were a set of necessary building and operational qualifications that must be met and signed off. Any snagging items could also be identified within the building phase and these could then be signed off once a solution was defined.
Along with my main responsibilities I was very involved within all the various aspects of the project to some degree. Some of these included the development of the action planner and assisting with the energy analysis within the energy sub team. However, one of my main other responsibilities was the development of the LabVIEW programming for the experimental procedures along with Francis Head. This involved extensive consultation with John Redgate as none of the group had any past LabVIEW programming experience. Having developed the LabVIEW programme, this allowed me to, have a good understanding of the wiring into the 6008s and so I led this aspect in the setup of experiments and also did most of the parameter changing in lab view for both experimental and subjective testing.
My allocated responsibility throughout the project was to track the budget and manage procurement. It was important to effectively manage our budget of £600, ensuring that we had funds reserved in the event of an unexpected purchase requirement given the continuously evolving nature of the project. This role involved part sourcing, collaboration with the Strathclyde Stores Manager, meetings with our project supervisor to obtain authorisation for our purchases and the upkeep of a budget tracker spreadsheet. Our first order was placed in December so that, upon returning after Christmas, we could begin the construction phase without delay. As the system design was continuously evolving, our last order was placed during the final stages of the build phase in February.
Although an ongoing role, I was able to take on other responsibilities throughout the project. I was a member of the CFD modelling sub-team and carried out all tasks delegated to me to the best of my ability. Throughout the second half of the project, I also took more of a role in the upkeep/maintenance of the project blog.
My role within the team was to head up the experimental phase of the project. This involved securing rooms suitable to our needs for the duration of testing, setting out procedures for each test and analysing the results. Another task was making sure that the experimental phase adhered to the project schedule as close as possible due to the limited period of time afterwards that would be needed to evaluate our work and finish the report. I wrote out the experimental procedures setting up the parameters that would be followed during this period looking to replicate the conditions of an office area. I had help from Kenta who took responsibility on the subjective stage of testing along with John and Francis who with the aid of John Redgate designed the labview programme and ran this during testing.
Along with this I was also involved in the design and construction period of the project taking part when it came to choosing the appropriate diffuser head, the general construction of the PV system and I was involved in the soldering sub team with Francis. I also worked with John and Frank doing some preliminary energy analysis as part of the energy sub team.
The primary role of the communications leader was to maintain a dialogue between the group and any external contacts. In practice this meant arranging meetings with Paul, John Redgate or any other individual as required. Whilst this meant I had involvement in many areas certain areas became more prevalent. For example due to the degree of John Redgate’s much appreciated involvement in the control system design and my role as communications leader it seemed natural that I took ownership of the control system in its entirety. This ran through each stage of the control system from hardware design and manufacture to creation of the LabVIEW program which I did jointly with John Ewing.
Outside of the control system and communications work I was part of the energy sub team with John Ewing and Jamie McMorran and maintained the minutes for every meeting. The minutes have since proved to be a useful tool for reflection and been the basis for the blog which I have had joint responsibility for.
One of the main role of Design Verification Leader was to ensure that the design was meeting the necessary requirements for air conditioning systems. My role also involved the main part of connection between mechanical systems and human comfortable requirement. Our project is very wide compared with previous articles because the range was from making systems to subjective testing. In order to make our systems best, I picked up the some points from various previous articles and combined them with the best way. It is important to check the overall system from various viewpoints and verify the system.
Along with the verification role, my contribution for this project is making subjective testing procedure. Our time is very limited to experiment with subjects. Other works took much more time to ensure the result more than our project. However in the limited available time, we thought about the way that made the results best. In addition, we considered the good questionnaire that must be easy for subjects to understand and also give us great analytical results.
My responsibilities throughout the project included: setting and updating the project schedule as work progressed; organising the group submissions; organising the sub-teams and managing the distribution of the group resources; managing the CFD sub-team (Laura & Kenta); construction of the high-voltage housing (with Francis & John); and results analysis (with Jamie & Kenta).
The project schedule was an important document, giving a broad overview of the expected time required for each task, and the order in which they had to be completed. As part of this role, I had to ensure that the group was sticking to schedule and that our deadlines were met. As an extension of this role, I also took charge of compiling and editing the group submissions (primarily interim & final reports). Another ‘organisation’ task was to manage the group resources, i.e. time. The individual sub-teams would report their workload and whether they required assistance or not.
Most recently, I constructed the high-voltage housing with reference to Francis (control leader) and John (construction leader), this was the unit that took mains power and converted it to 24V in order to power the heaters when the relays allowed. I took a role in the analysis of the results, working with Kenta and Jamie in their respective two sections (qualitative and quantitative) to help identify the trends we were seeing and the conclusions that could be drawn.