Official Day 1

Today was awesome!

It was mostly orientation day and before lunch, one of the volunteer coordinators, Nick, gave us an overview of the Institute and some information on our project. We then took a walk to the closest beach, which used to be a test site for WindAid, but is now washed away. We got to see first hand the effects of climate change on a community. There is a rock wall that is the barrier between the ocean and the community currently. We went up above the rock wall to see the Pacific Ocean and it was beautiful but also super sad because so much of what we were looking at used to be inhabited by Peruvians.

The rock wall 

Almost all of the volunteers on the wall

The city on the other side of the wall

Unique architecture built into the wall

We ate lunch at a very nice restaurant nearby and I had a turkey meal with rice and potatoes which was decent. We then went back to the volunteer house and changed to go to the shop for the first time!

The shop was in a commercial building area with other workshops. It's guarded by a person, so it's surely secure. There's a lot going on in the shop! We were given a tour and a safety lesson and then broke off into groups. One group worked on turning coils for the alternator, one group started some blade work with fiberglass and my group got a crash course in welding! I was pretty horrible at welding, but I'm definitely going to get more practice, and it wasn't that bad of a start. Of the few of us that were in that group, two of us had some welding experience but me and another girl didn't. It was interesting to see our progression in the technique as the time went on.

We're going to be helping with some testing and R&D too! The normal and smaller 500 watt blades we are building are not supposed to have a metal skeleton inside, but if a blade breaks (due to falling or hitting a bird or bat mainly), the parts that break off become projectiles, so in order to avoid this, WindAid wants to test a blade with a metal skeleton inside and run it in the shop to test it's level of strength over the original design.

Also, the towers that are currently used are strictly wood. This is a decent material because it doesn't ever rain in Playa Blanca, so the only damage that could occur would be termite damage or rot if it somehow got wet. Two towers in Playa Blanca have fallen, one due to termites, and one due to rot. The rotted one only rotted because the family pushed water over to the tower area after washing their porch everyday. Therefore, WindAid is experimenting with adding metal components to the towers to give them more strength.

One of the interns is experimenting with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi technology to do some remote data collection from each turbine in Playa Blanca. It's cool to recognize these technologies and have used them in class! We'll see if I'll get to help at all with that.

I'm super excited to go back, and will definitely post photos of the shop soon. We were only there for a few hours today, but there's plenty more time to be spent there.

Dinner was made at the volunteer house by a lady who will always make us traditional food for dinner. Dinner will always be vegetarian (very sustainable!) and tonight was potatoes and rice with a spicy cheese sauce which was really good!

I'm really enjoying getting to know all of the other cultures of volunteers here. We're all engineers (biomedical, mechanical, chemical, renewable energy, sustainable energy) and the final list of areas they are all originally from includes South Africa (2), St. Vincent (1), Hungary (1), Columbia (2), Wales (1), Australia (3), New Zealand (1), Iowa (1), Utah (1), Pennsylvania (1), New York (me), and a handful from Peru which will round off 21 people total, 12 short-term (4 weeks) volunteers and 9 long-term volunteers/interns in addition to the people who are here permanently. We all have different engineering school experiences and coursework which is neat to see. It's awesome to communicate with such intelligent people who are totally interested in the same things you are!

I can't wait to keep going!!