Past Hiatus and Project Presentation
Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2012 2:35 pmSome may have noticed of my absence, others may not have cared. Either way, the Semester is coming to an end and I'll have some more free time.
Concerning the reason for my temporary hiatus, was due to an extensive project I've been working with fellow Environmental Science students since last year and received some publicity in our local area.
Lüneburg, the town where I study and live atm, lies on the river Ilmenau. The river flows through the town and two weirs use it for energy production. We (our project group) noticed that the fish ladders on the weirs are severely out dated and do not offer an optimal passage for organisms to swim upstream. As future environmental scientist, we started this project to find/research ways to optimize the fish ladders for the two weirs as well as optimize the turbines that use the river to produce electricity. After a year of research and planning, we came to the conclusion that an optimization for both fish ladder and energy production is feasible, as well as required due to German laws that would likely be enforced within the next 10 years.
To summarize what came out of the project:
- Optimization of energy production can be increased by 30%, with a potential energy production of 470 MWh of electricity per year for one weir/mill. That is about enough electricity to supply 135 multi-family homes with 'clean electricity'.
- An optimization of the fish ladder is also possible. With an increase in water volume and enabling organisms to swim upstream must easier.
- Furthermore, the energy production will benefit from the EEG (Renewable Energy Act from Germany) and the fish ladder will cover environmental laws on river flow for organisms for at-least a few decades.
- We also planned concepts combined to the project to help inhabitants understand the reason behind the project, increase social acceptance, and value to the city (land value and tourism).
In the end, we organised a presentation and invited key actors that could give us feed-back and evaluate our project. We had engineers, professors, politicians, reporters, lawyers and several others come. It was quite a success and we hope that the different players/actors will be able to work together to enable an implementation of our project in the near future.
We got on the Regional Newspaper 'Landeszeitung'. Here is the short online article (non-German speakers may want to use a translator): http://www.landeszeitung.de/lokales/lue ... er-nutzen/
What part did I take in the project? Well, I was in charge of creating a 3-D model of the weirs and implement our fish ladder concept into the model. I used local photos and from 'google maps' to create a near scale replica (I say 95% accurate) of one of the weirs named Ratsmühle. We used the model in our presentation so people will be better able to visualize the 'end concept'.
Here's the video of the model:
We're planning on making a new video with commentary explaining more in detail about the project to get more publicity. We'll be making (I hope) both a German and an English version.
If you read through the entire post, thank you for your interest and hope you enjoyed it!
Cheers
Yanoda
Concerning the reason for my temporary hiatus, was due to an extensive project I've been working with fellow Environmental Science students since last year and received some publicity in our local area.
Lüneburg, the town where I study and live atm, lies on the river Ilmenau. The river flows through the town and two weirs use it for energy production. We (our project group) noticed that the fish ladders on the weirs are severely out dated and do not offer an optimal passage for organisms to swim upstream. As future environmental scientist, we started this project to find/research ways to optimize the fish ladders for the two weirs as well as optimize the turbines that use the river to produce electricity. After a year of research and planning, we came to the conclusion that an optimization for both fish ladder and energy production is feasible, as well as required due to German laws that would likely be enforced within the next 10 years.
To summarize what came out of the project:
- Optimization of energy production can be increased by 30%, with a potential energy production of 470 MWh of electricity per year for one weir/mill. That is about enough electricity to supply 135 multi-family homes with 'clean electricity'.
- An optimization of the fish ladder is also possible. With an increase in water volume and enabling organisms to swim upstream must easier.
- Furthermore, the energy production will benefit from the EEG (Renewable Energy Act from Germany) and the fish ladder will cover environmental laws on river flow for organisms for at-least a few decades.
- We also planned concepts combined to the project to help inhabitants understand the reason behind the project, increase social acceptance, and value to the city (land value and tourism).
In the end, we organised a presentation and invited key actors that could give us feed-back and evaluate our project. We had engineers, professors, politicians, reporters, lawyers and several others come. It was quite a success and we hope that the different players/actors will be able to work together to enable an implementation of our project in the near future.
We got on the Regional Newspaper 'Landeszeitung'. Here is the short online article (non-German speakers may want to use a translator): http://www.landeszeitung.de/lokales/lue ... er-nutzen/
What part did I take in the project? Well, I was in charge of creating a 3-D model of the weirs and implement our fish ladder concept into the model. I used local photos and from 'google maps' to create a near scale replica (I say 95% accurate) of one of the weirs named Ratsmühle. We used the model in our presentation so people will be better able to visualize the 'end concept'.
Here's the video of the model:
We're planning on making a new video with commentary explaining more in detail about the project to get more publicity. We'll be making (I hope) both a German and an English version.
If you read through the entire post, thank you for your interest and hope you enjoyed it!
Cheers
Yanoda
