Profession: Engineer/Designer

Inspired by: My personal inspiration for this project was my desire to participate in the rapid response disaster relief for the survivors of Haiti’s terrible 7.3 magnitude earthquake which struck in January 2010. I was the design engineer member of the Princeton student multi-disciplinary team that produced “Power in the Box”, an EPA award winning solution for delivering small scale wind power in shipping containers to Haiti. I realized that the “Power in the Box” concept was valuable for locations where a shipping container could be transported to, but there are many remote locations in dire need of power that a shipping container cannot practically be delivered to. My conviction that there was still an important unsolved problem that engineering ingenuity could remedy inspired me to start designing KITE – the first version of which I presented for my BSE thesis at Princeton University. Easily transportable and deployable wind power will be a valuable tool in disaster relief and remote power generation. KITE strives to be the most efficient (by average electric power to total mass) solution to the yet-unrealized reusable and deployable wind power generation system with the rigid volume constraint of fitting in the back of an average size pickup truck. The pick-up truck size constraint is chosen because of its ready availability throughout the world for transportation to remote sites where this design solution will be most valuable.