Beginning a New Year

Welcome to another year at Michigan Tech from the Solar Car Team. We are a few weeks into the school year and so much has already been set into motion. Firstly the team would like to welcome back most of our previous team members and introduce our five new team members Rob Ferris, Michael Pawlicki, Orlando Reyes, Stephen DeCeuninck and Jacob Menchak. I will post a link to updated bios and team pictures within the next couple of weeks once the team obtains polo’s for the new members.

The team is proud to have a new sponsor in Dow Corning. Over the course of the summer the team was in contact with Dow Corning about a possible materials or cash donation. In the end their generous cash donation is going to allow the team to confidently proceed in building our solar car this year. Thank you Dow Corning.

The plan for this semester is to build our chassis and shell. The tubing for our chassis is being donated by Arcelor Mittal and should arrive by the first week in October. At that time we will begin bending and welding our chassis together. Hopefully during that time our carbon fiber and resin will arrive and our shell team can begin experimenting and gaining experience working with those materials. That experience will come by designing and fabricating a new carbon fiber shell for our demonstration car. Shortly thereafter the team will begin to layup our shell and all the intricacies involved in that. During this time our newly expanded electrical team will be planning our array and controls with the ultimate goal of having a list of products and prices so that when the team receives the funding we are ready to make those purchases.

As always, the team is pursuing additional sponsorship opportunities and if they work out additional details will be posted here and on our website. 

Thanks for reading,
~Dan Sallen

Summer Update

Hello again. It has been quite a while since I have updated our blog here. Well I am back with a summer update!


The team successfully navigated our way through April and all of our individual finals without too much difficulty. The name of the game for April was tying up loose ends and compiling our end of year report. Our loose ends included a few final touches to our models to bring them to a good place before the summer, reconnecting with our alumni donors to thank them properly for their support, and most exciting of all, finalizing a large product donation from 3M. This donation was part of a larger donation to the entire Enterprise program and the Solar Car Team is very grateful to have been included in that offering and we will make the most of the supplies donated.


Our report describes everything the team has accomplished in the year in detail. This report ended up being the largest yet produced by the Solar Car Team at nearly 70 pages. The report included sections on all mechanical, electrical, material, and business aspects of our project, but also included sections on team outreach to the larger Enterprise and Enterprise programs and a preview of next year’s senior design projects. After much editing, pruning, and shaping for style and voice, using all those muscles engineers hate to flex, the report was presented to our advisor. Dr. Keith examined the report and gave the team constructive criticism which will help our future efforts.


Our proposed, and accepted, projects for senior design are going to be either one of two options. The first option being designing and fabricating the steering system for our solar car. This design will include detailed kinematic and dynamic models of the steering and linkage system in both Unigraphics and MatLab with the ultimate goal of constructing and validating our models. The second option is to run detailed flow simulations to maximize the efficiency of our shell. This project will involve learning how to properly utilize flow analysis software which nobody on our team is very experienced with, fabricating scale models of our shell designs, and devising a small scale, cheap experimental method to collect data on our shells.


Our plans for the summer are going to be fairly low key. We will continue to explore sponsorship opportunities with companies who are excited about alternative energy and the roles that future engineers will play in making those alternatives possible. Our leadership will also look to reflect on how the team can continue to grow positively by assessing our successes and failures of the previous year. Hopefully, this searching will lead to better practices and continued leadership next year.


If I don’t see you have a great summer.


Until next time,
~Dan Sallen

Hope, Heartbreak, and Donors

Welcome back everyone! The Michigan Tech solar car team is back after our spring break and is thoroughly enjoying the unseasonably warm weather in the U.P. Personally I had a great break in Washington D.C., where I learned a ton and experienced even more wandering around our nation’s capital. Much has happened in the two weeks since the team has been back at it.

First off, our Adopt-a-Cell brochures went out to our alumni and I am proud to say that the team has its very first donations. Thank you to all the people that have supported us and to those who are yet considering donating to our project. Also in this vein, the team has been in contact with a few companies who are considering sponsoring our endeavor. The team remains hopeful that we will find all the support we need to succeed in this ambitious project.

On to the heartbreak for the last few weeks… Over the break our team leader, Brennan, successfully completed the modifications to our array for the R/C project. The car ran great; completely off battery, with direct power from the array driving the motors and lights. The team was proud to demo the car for our larger Enterprise and even drew a small crowd outside of our building as we drove it around the sidewalk, however our elation was not to last. In an attempt to share our success with our followers on the website Brennan and I took the car outside to shoot a small video and take pictures that weekend. We were about to finish up when a gust of wind caught our car and flipped it over onto the array. About a third of our cells shattered on the cement. Luckily we still have extras from our initial order but the car was not going to be ready for the Enterprise recruitment fair so the project has been put on the backburner. The car will live again with additional protections but it is no longer high on the list of projects to complete. Many lessons were learned the hard way during this process but it has been a great way for the team to familiarize ourselves with actually working with the technology.

Finally the team is gearing up for next year as everyone is registering for classes. We have successfully recruited at least two new members so the team will grow going into our build phase. The members include a mechanical and material science major who will both be extremely useful as the team starts realizing what it takes to build this car. The recruitment fair was under attended this year but the team is always hopeful for surprising members to come out of the woodwork and a new class of freshmen to get excited about our project.

Well I have to get to our Enterprise meeting. I hope everyone has a great day and is enjoying the spring weather.

~Dan

The Car Works!

Hello everyone, big news for the team this week.  After much testing and troubleshooting the R/C solar car finally works under its own power! Most of the delay was due to the weather being so poor that the team could not bring the car outside for proper full spectrum testing. Finally the Upper Peninsula got a stretch of warm, cloud free weather where the team could go outside and run the car without plowing through snow. Now that the proof of concept has…well… been proven, the goal is to extend the array with our left over cells and invest in a couple full spectrum lamps so that we can demonstrate the car inside at recruiting events and shows. Perhaps I can get a good video posted on the website in the future but no promises.

On top of the ecstasy brought on by the success of our R/C car the team has also moved very close to meeting our goal of having the full shell and chassis modeled by this next weekend. Obviously there will be adjustments over time as we merge the two together and find that pieces simply don’t fit. But the models have been set up so that alterations can happen as smoothly as possible. At this time the team can share, fairly confidently, the dimensions and shape of the shell and the layout of the chassis. At the same time the team has been developing a few models in Mat lab for various aspects of the car in an initial attempt to optimize some of our choice design features. The features modeled include the aerodynamic resistance of our car in terms of power loss based on speed of travel, how the latitude, longitude, and height above sea level affect the power generation of our array, and our steering angle as a function of wheelbase and desired turn radius to name a few. Eventually the team would like to model how our car will run on the actual race course and optimize for those conditions.

Finally the team has been working with the University continuously to identify target alumni who may be interested in our project. So hopefully by next week the team will be able to start sending out our alumni brochure and information on our Adopt-A-Cell program. I will see if we can get that information up on our website soon and post a link here for you generous readers to support us.

I hope you all have a great week as always.

~Dan

Winter Carnival Week

Hello again everybody. It has been over a week now since I did an update to the blog and it has been a very busy time at Tech. Last week was the Winter Carnival and everyone on the team had a great time partaking in the variety of activities. A few members had family up for the festivities so we took a small break over the week and pushed our meeting to Sunday.

In the last week the team has split into our electrical and mechanical teams to focus on our individual tasks. The mechanical team is trying to get a benchmark weight for the vehicle by putting together a preliminary chassis and shell design. This weight estimate will give the electrical team a better idea of what size of motor to look for and ultimately a place to start in the electrical design.

At the mechanical meeting J.R. put together some chassis concept drawings based off of other solar car teams and super mileage vehicles. I worked on Unigraphics 5 to put an accurate scale to my shell design. This next week I have to get together with J.R. to see how we want to fit the chassis into the shell and how we will mount the two together. The race specifications are making the shell design in particular very hard. We have to fit a driver inside of the vehicle and they have to have a certain amount of visibility but at the same time we need fairly large, relatively flat space to put the array and the vehicle still has to maintain a good aerodynamic profile. Also this week Brennan and Ben are researching materials for the shell and chassis so that as soon as the designs are done we can ballpark a weight right away. Not to be outdone Christian put together two Matlab programs for us. The first estimates power output for an array based on time of day and height above sea level. The second estimates our aerodynamic resistance and rolling resistance and converts that into a total power loss.

The team has its larger Enterprise meeting today where we will lay out our goals for the next week. I hope everyone has a great week and thank you for reading.

~Dan

New Members

It has been an exciting second week for the Michigan Tech Solar Car team. We received the wonderful news that our team membership grew 100% so now we have 6 enthusiastic members as we go into our design phase. Our new members are Joe Rushing, Jonathon Crowe (J.R.), and Christian Rose. Check out their bios and the bios of previous members here.

We are moving right along in the semester in terms of our solar car project and the larger Alternative Fuels Group (AFG) Enterprise. This week the larger Enterprise welcomed John Leinonen as a presenter for the Michigan initiative SmartZones. They work closely with universities in an attempt to use commercially viable enterprises to establish small businesses and work opportunities in the surrounding communities. He was very interested in a few of the projects that AFG is currently working on; in particular our smaller scale localized energy generation projects. Hopefully this opportunity pans out and an AFG project has the chance to positively affect our community in a big way. For more information on each of the SmartZones check out this interactive map.

Also in the news this week is the relief effort for Haiti. Of particular interest to our group and something that is getting more media attention is the use of solar technology to help in the recovery effort. MSNBC’s Cosmic Log has a great article on how solar technology is helping the survivors pump fresh water, cook food, keep schools running, and provide medical attention to the wounded. Since the local infrastructure has been destroyed solar energy allows for the production of power onsite for immediate use. Solar energy is the perfect solution to Haiti’s power needs. The country is one of the sunniest in the world and has long been considered one of the best places to attempt to produce a solar energy economy. I hope one day the country will be stable enough to show the world the viability of solar energy technology even for impoverished nations. This relief effort may be a small first step towards that kind of energy independence but the focus should remain on providing services for the survivors. I am happy to say that solar energy is and will continue to be a large part of that effort. Read the MSNBC article here.

I hope to bring more information about our efforts next week as we continue to get the new members up to speed and set our vision for the semester. I hope you all have a great week and thanks for reading.

~Dan

Hello

Hello and welcome to the first ever blog by the Michigan Tech Solar Car Team! We had our first meeting of the semester yesterday and it was great to see some new faces in the Alternative Fuels Group Enterprise. Hopefully a few of them will be interested in joining our project and we will update our roster next week accordingly.

This semester is going to be a big one for our team as we are planning to move forward quickly in the modeling stage of our design. Our plan is to have a few weeks of brainstorming and housekeeping to get any new members up to speed and assess their skills to more effectively break up the work load. Then we will move right into modeling; keeping our design very fluid so we can address issues as they arise (and for sure they will). Then finally by the end of this semester we would like to have manufactured or bought at least one part that will for sure be a component of the vehicle. The team will have other responsibilities and tasks during that time but the above is our very general breakdown of what we would like to accomplish this semester.

On the sponsorship front we are continuing to pursue leads generated from last semester. The holidays slowed us up a little as it became very hard to communicate with potential sponsors over that time. Also, the team is working closely with our Enterprise program and our Alumni office to get our Adopt-a-Cell program off the ground so individual donations can be realized easily. Our goal from last semester was to have 10% of our budget by March and the team is working very hard to achieve that.

Finally an update on the R/C car; a week before the holiday break we received the parts we ordered to construct a radio controlled solar car. The idea was that this car could be a proof of concept as well as a nice interactive recruiting tool at the Undergrad Expo. So far we have stripped down the R/C car and constructed a working solar array. The array produces enough power under indoor lighting to run all of the LEDs and the speaker (yes the car makes engine noises and even plays music!), but not enough to run the motors. The team has yet to take it outside for testing but we expect much better results.

That is a little bit about where the team is at right now. I hope to update this regularly every week so continue to stop by or follow us and check out our official website at:

http://www.enterprise.mtu.edu/afg/solar.htm

See you next week,

~Dan