Are you ready to be part of the renewable energy revolution?

Renewable innovation powerhouse 5B is looking for Australia’s smartest women to accelerate their personal career opportunities while accelerating the adoption of solar power globally.

Work alongside some of Australia’s most talented renewable energy engineers to discover new and effective ways to use automation, robotics and advanced processes to solve real-world challenges in solar farm deployment.

Named for our very own "Mademoiselle Edison", Australia’s first female electrical engineer Florence McKenzie, the 5B Florence McKenzie Program is a chance to participate in developing the next generation of solar engineering solutions, to create a safer, greener and more sustainable future for everyone.

Be part of the solution and access potential internships or future permanent roles at 5B!

THE 5B FLORENCE MCKENZIE PROGRAM

The 5B Florence McKenzie Program is a 6-day event for women studying engineering within Australia. Participants will compete by working on an assignment that focuses on a current business challenge at 5B. Students will network with industry experts, learn more about the renewable energy industry and raise their awareness of the need to accelerate the implementation of renewable solutions.

Students will be provided with a business challenge and systems/software that they might need to find solutions and complete the task successfully. They will also have access to Sprint mentors that will be responsible for guiding them through the challenge.

The event will start on Friday 08 July 2022 at the 5B Mascot Campus. All students are expected to attend the event in person and will be assigned to their group for the duration.

There are two projects that have been outlined for the event that focuses on a business challenge for 5B. The projects are as follows.

1. Deployment Location Challenge - Using robots to help locate and navigate to where the 5B Maverick needs to be deployed The 5B ecosystem of assembly partners manufactures and ships Mavericks to a site to be deployed to become part of a solar farm. The current deployment process, while significantly faster than a regular solar farm deployment, is still time-consuming and requires several people, one of whom drives a large telehandler. Mavericks are delivered to locations defined by a surveyor per the site layout and then folded out as part of the deployment process. They must be kept parallel to each other in both the X & Y direction.

What if we could do this automatically?

Your challenge is to take a small mobile robot fitted with encoders and an inertial motion unit and develop some control software to demonstrate the navigation and location required to automatically deploy 5B Mavericks.

2. Ecosystem Challenge - Layout Optimisation Engine

5B and its ecosystem partners deploy solar farms made up of many Mavericks in locations all over the world. We have several advantages over other technologies that we can exploit, including our speed to deploy, and our better coverage of a given area to enhance solar yield. Our Technical Sales team currently draws up each site in AutoCAD to maximise the energy produced over the site. This is a time-consuming process and does not often allow for multiple variations to be iterated over to find the best result.

What if we could optimise this for every site to provide the best combination, layout, and configuration of Mavericks to produce the highest overall energy yield?

Your challenge is to build a layout optimisation engine. It could be spreadsheet-based (Excel or GoogleSheets), database-based (Access, MySQL, Quickbase, etc), or programmatically based (Python, C++, PHP, R, etc). It must be able to give some indication of where each 5B Maverick is positioned (location and orientation) - this can be done via text (CSV, XML, etc) or preferably graphically (web page, CAD file).

Please note that we will only be considering students that are currently based in Australia.

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