2. Compliance with Master Plan
To thoroughly adhere to The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's campus goals, our development plan was guided by UNL’s Master Plan. UNL places a large emphasis on ambitious campus growth, while also setting forth a mission to protect their East Campus’ agricultural research lands from development activities.
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2.1. CITY CAMPUS
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UNL’s Master Plan calls Love Library the “heart of the campus,” emphasizing that it will be a vibrant gathering place and a hub for students, staff, and visitors alike [7]. Their future plans include making the bottom floor walls of the library transparent and creating vibrant gardens around the building, as seen in Figure 2. Our team felt it fitting that we expand on the garden plans that UNL has by placing a single solar flower in front of the building, visible to all who are both inside of the library and in the garden space.
This will be the ultimate display of UNL’s dedication to solar initiatives. The space will be aesthetically enhanced by the beauty that comes with a solar flower, and students can look out from the library and watch the solar tracking abilities of the incredible solar display. This underscores UNL’s desire to emphasize the steps they have taken to make their campus greener. Additionally, we would like to mount a digital display in front of the solar flower that acts as an informational and educational data display. It will show important figures and educate readers on the positive environmental impacts that UNL is taking on their campuses. Two examples of figures that may be put on the educational display are the total yield of our design and the CO2 avoidance, shown in Figure 3.
We also turned to the future construction plans in the Master Plan to ensure that no future buildings will be built on the location that we plan to put our solar flower on. This can be seen in Figures 4 and 5.
2.2. EAST CAMPUS
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For the East Campus, we paid close attention to UNL’s future construction plans to ensure that the buildings that we have chosen to place panels on will not be altered, knocked down, or have their sunlight exposure obstructed. Their future construction plan can be seen in Figure 6.
Keeping this in mind, we were able to select the Agricultural building, the Animal Science building, Barkley Memorial Center, C.Y. Thompson Library, Chase Hall, the College of Dentistry, Nebraska East Union, the Entomology Hall, the Food Industry Complex, Keim Hall, the Law College, and the Plant Sciences building to construct rooftop mounts, as seen in Figure 7.
UNL’s future construction plan outlines new buildings adjacent to the Agricultural Building, the Food Complex, the Animal Science Complex, the Law College, and Barclay Memorial. This poses a risk to our plan because new buildings have the potential to obstruct sunlight if they are taller and close enough to the buildings with rooftop mounts. Although we do not know the exact height of the future buildings, we believe the risk of them towering over the buildings we have selected is minimal as the building heights on campus seem relatively consistent, as seen through Google street view [8]. An example screenshot is shown in Figure 8.
None of the buildings we selected will be knocked down or altered, thus that risk is mitigated.
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2.3. AGRICULTURAL FIELD
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In selecting ground mounts for the Agricultural Campus, we considered the essential research that takes place on the agricultural land, as well as UNL’s land-grant history. We needed to ensure that our choice did not disrupt the agricultural research of the site nor that the field will be susceptible to construction. After analyzing the Master Plan and land grant history, we were able to conclude that this land will not be susceptible to construction, thus we may confidently place ground mounted solar panels on this site. Figure 9 proves that no future construction will occur on this site, securing our location placement for the ground mounts.
