Miguel Muñoz
UTRGV Mechanical Engineering student Miguel Muñoz had the opportunity to complete his UTCRS REU experience at Texas A&M University. Mr. Muñoz showed a deep interest in alternative energy harvesting methods. He found an application in the problem of energy harvesting to generate power for sensors mounted on moving rail cars and along the railroad networks. The availability of power for sensors assessing the conditions of a train in motion is important, because the sensors must be operational in order to detect any issues that may arise. Mr. Muñoz experimented with the conversion of wind to mechanical energy, in order to generate enough power for a typical setup of rail car and railway monitoring sensors. His setup was based in micro wind turbine generators, mounted in two locations. The first location chosen was the top of the railcars. This allowed Mr. Muñoz to use the wind energy from the moving train to harvest energy, and power the on-board safety, sensing, and communication systems, as well as charge the on-board batteries to power these systems when the train is stationary. The second location where these micro wind turbine generators where placed was along the railway, taking advantage of the wind gust produced by the moving train to generate and provide power to the track monitoring systems. Mr. Muñoz also integrated a solar panel system to charge the batteries of the monitoring systems along the railway side, when there is no railway traffic and natural wind currents.