Team Members & Role:

• Team Lead: Erin Carney
• Design Lead: Lucy Madden
• Design Lead: Luke Elliott
• Analysis Lead: Luke Bryson
• Fabrication Lead: Xingan Shi
• Evaluation Lead: Mihir Patki

Abstract:
While food provides the nutrients everyone needs to survive, meals bring people closer together. The Dwight Street Community garden in Holyoke has been working to make the most of self-grown produce to provide nutritious food to the community for free, but also to get citizens to build relationships with each other outdoors, celebrating foods of many cultures. A current problem the garden currently faces is food storage. When the garden harvests food, the surplus spoils before it can be distributed to community members. To counter this, the sponsor company, Neighbor to Neighbor, has employed team 1502 to design a food storage system that will preserve the garden’s produce. While most refrigerators are designed to store produce, animal products, oils, and other goods, the garden’s fridge will specifically store vegetables; as a result, the methods used to regulate the refrigerator’s conditions can be tailored to the niche conditions of strictly preserving vegetables. Throughout the semester, the team designed two additional components to increase the refrigerator’s efficiency: a thermal energy storage and a misting system. The thermal energy storage was designed to reduce power draw in high demand periods, and the misting system was designed to reduce vegetable wilting. The misting system configuration is shown as a CAD assembly below. The prototypes of these designs were then fabricated and tested. The evaluation results were used to validate a theoretical thermal model of the system that was then used to match a full-scale model for a refrigerator the garden would actually use.