The Solar Step

     Currently at StFX all graduating engineering students are enrolled in a design and communications course. The goal of this course is to teach students real world applications of the material they have learned over the past 2-3 years. A main part of this course is a design project. Students are split into groups and are required to present a problem and propose a solution.

Our Problem:

     Safety is a great concern for all universities alike. Ensuring that their students and staff can have unrestricted access to administrative and educational buildings without fear of injury. While the walking pathways are efficiently cleared by plows, the stairs around campus must be manually shoveled. Not only does this require a great amount of time and labour, students can attest to the fact that the stairs on campus are rarely cleared to a safe standard. Our goal is to come up with a practical solution to this issue and keep the stairways of our university safe for all!

The Solution:

     Our solution is to design a heated panneling system that can be secured to the stairs during the winter. The surface of these pannels will heat up to melt snow and ice as it forms, thus keeping the stairs clear at all times. To keep our design sustainable, it was decided to implement solar pannels as the source of power.