RUNNING HEAD: PROJECT ZEPHYR PROGRESS REPORT 1

Project Zephyr
Progress Report 1
Kelly Crocker
Noah Wong
Vallabi Vallaban
October 13, 2016

Objective:
The objective was to determine the focus of the research project through background research
and outline the experimental design and research plans to serve as a guide throughout the year.

PROJECT ZEPHYR PROGRESS REPORT 1

Materials and Methods

This first month of school mainly consisted of research and decision making about the
materials and methods to be used in the research experiment, though the materials and methods
detailed here may be subject to change if a better option becomes apparent. To answer the
research question about air pollution as related to demographics, the constructed airship will
serve as a platform for testing and collecting data over various terrain to prove or deny our
hypothesis. The airship will be powered by photovoltaic cells in order to be self-sustaining. It
will also be equipped with a GPS tracking system and batteries to store excess energy generated
by the solar panels for use during the night hours.
Though that airship will encompass the means to collect viable data, that data will be
collected by a series of sensors including carbon monoxide and other hazardous gas detectors
such as hydrogen sulfide and nitrogen oxides, though these are subject to change. The data from
these sensors will then be processed by software run on a Raspberry Pi or Arduino to recognize
and display correlations between pollutant registers and GPS location and demographic
information.
The first important project to be completed is the construction of the airship. The airship
will need to be unmanned and self-sustaining with room on board for all the testing and
computing components. The first step of this plan is to master the feasibility component of
designing an airship by determining such things as the ratio of photovoltaic cells to batteries and
surface area of the outside cover to the number of photovoltaic cells that can be attached to it and
the type of motor that can be run on the power generated. With this information, a design for the
airship can be put down on paper to serve as a model and the fine tuning of configurations can be
hammered out before the actual construction begins. For the next interim period, we will be

PROJECT ZEPHYR PROGRESS REPORT 1

focusing on the design of the airship and creating a rough blueprint detailing the location of
different components such as the motor, batteries, photovoltaic cells, GPS system, and an
estimation of where the testing sensors will be located. With this information, we will be able to
put together a budget and focus on ordering the materials necessary to physically construct the
airship; this process may stretch over several weeks as materials take time to arrive, etc.

PROJECT ZEPHYR PROGRESS REPORT 1

Data and Results

Due to the focus of these first weeks on research and project development, there is a
decided lack of data to be expressed at this point. Most of the research we have done is focused
on theory rather than specific trials, experiments, and calculations pertinent to our project.
However, there were a few specific details that pertained to our project. One example is that the
power requirement of a nine-meter airship was determined to be 1000 W/m^3 for a 24-hour
period (Kantor, 2001). This information serves as a foundation that we can then base the
calculations for the requirements of our airship off of. Obviously, the airship we construct in the
classroom will be scaled down quite a bit from nine meters to approximately one and a half
meters. For the purposes of this experiment, it only needs to serve as a platform to test for two or
three of the criteria pollutants recognized by the EPA that are included in our hypothesis
(Criteria Air Pollutants).

Figure 1: This is a rough idea of the components and their placement as well as airship design.

PROJECT ZEPHYR PROGRESS REPORT 1

References
Criteria Air Pollutants. (n.d.). Retrieved October 06, 2016, from
https://www.epa.gov/criteria-air-pollutants
Kantor, G., Wettergreen, D., Ostrowski, J. P., & Singh, S. (2001). Collection of environmental
data from an airship platform. In Intelligent Systems and Advanced Manufacturing (pp.
76-83). International Society for Optics and Photonics. Retrieved from:
http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=901120