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