Maybe We Can Have Nice Things!

Hello again readers! It's been a pretty crazy week, but that's not terribly uncommon these days, with both high school and the college choosing process coming down to the finish line, so it's always nice to just sit down and write a blog post where I can share with you guys and reflect on what I've learned so far. It's a little scary to think about it, but even this project is getting pretty close to finishing up, so I'm beginning to focus less and less on researching and learning new things and more on working towards writing my research paper and my final presentation. But that doesn't mean that I can't spend a little time messing around with antennas still!

Now that I've set my system requirements with a little table fairly similar to the example that I showed last week, my next important step is to solidify the possible systems that I will be proposing and analyzing in my final products. Soon, maybe even today, I'm going to email a man who is probably currently the premier California sea otter researcher to ask him if he thinks my idea for putting a collar-like device at the base of an otter's tail is viable. If so, then suddenly both GPS and multilateration systems become much more attractive options, but as I already mentioned, both systems require that we worry about battery-life significantly more because they use much more power than a triangulation system's device.

Fortunately, I have a couple of ideas to extend battery life! I know that I'm not reinventing the wheel here with my project, because I don't know enough about electrical engineering to create a brilliant new tracking system, but perhaps I can synthesize our current technology with the older technology still in use in animal tracking devices to make a system that is better overall. That's why it's not particularly novel for me to suggest that we use solar-rechargeable batteries in tracking devices, but as far as I can tell it hasn't been done much. Although solar-powered devices could be very useful in devices for tracking other animals, I'm not too optimistic about the prospect of using it on a sea otter transmitter. Putting a tiny solar panel on the ankle or the base of the tail of a sea otter may not capture very much of the sun's energy. On top of that, from the videos of sea otters swimming that I've seen, it appears that the most of the sea otter's body is underwater most of the time, including the base of the tail and the ankles.

What I am more excited about is the possibility of using kinetically-rechargeable batteries in the devices to prolong their lives. No external attachment would have to me made to accommodate these batteries; in fact, utilizing them would be as simple as purchasing the batteries and plugging them in. As a bonus, the batteries themselves aren't even that expensive, at less than $25 a pop. Certainly if a transmitting device was attached to an otter's ankle the battery would be constantly recharged by the sea otter swimming and foraging for food, and I believe that a device at the base of the tail would get a fair amount of kinetic energy.

Please forgive the following scientific digression... this is the stuff that I get excited about. If you've taken college physics in the area of electricity and magnetism, this explanation of how rechargeable batteries work will be almost trivially simple. If you have a solenoid (the helically shaped wire below), you can move a magnet back and forth inside it to create a changing magnetic field, which in turn "inducts" an electrical current in the solenoid wire. If the solenoid wire is hooked up to a capacitor, the energy can be stored and used to recharge the battery and supply current. This system seems to me a remarkably simple yet subtly elegant way to prolong the life of any battery to the point where the battery is so effective that it may last longer than the device itself!

Passing a magnet through this solenoid is an easy way to generate an electric current. 

Well, that's all I have for this week. As always, thanks for reading!

Pictures: http://www.wildnatureimages.com/images%203/080505-003..jpg
http://www.school-for-champions.com/science/images/electromagnetic_solenoid__wire.jpg