After our discussions with Rick and Tal last week we decided that to be more on track with our project it was necessary that we reach out to more industry specialists in hopes of finally getting in contact with someone. We went back to the the drawing board and re-drafted our emails and tried reaching out to multiple people. We also called new contacts that we had found through further research of public transportation systems. Over break we had some successful interviews. The most important one was with Bart's sustainability director, Holly Gordon. She believes that although the flywheel technology is still quite new it could have potential use in the train system. It will have both significant impacts on cost and the environment. Bart currently uses the RCR technology, and she did mention that the Flywheel technology might not be very useful for Bart in specific but she did refer us to the public transit companies in the greater Chicago and Boston areas (as they use the regenerative breaking technology). Stijn and I also went back to the Professor who invented the flywheel because we had a few more questions to ask him. In our correspondence with the co-founder of Tesla. he said that he did not believe the flywheel system would be effective in electric so we went to the Professor who invented the flywheel to better understand his vision for the flywheel. He clarified and said the the flywheel is best used for hybrid cars because electric cars already efficiently use the battery system and make use of braking energy. With this clarification we better understood the patent. For the upcoming week the team will get together and make a draft of the pitch.
No comments:
Post a Comment