SOLAR CAR READY TO RAYCE
By Tom Maloney
Compared with three months ago, the room’s
a mess.
There’s
an aluminum chassis on the floor, lithium polymer battery
cells on one table, mathematical equations filling every
square centimetre
of dry-erase board, electrical wiring slithering every which
way, large pieces of cardboard inscribed in marker ink with
the words, “Do Not Touch!”
U of C’s solar car project is literally
racing to the finish, and it shows in the engineering building
lounge that
the project team converted into a makeshift manufacturing
plant in the fall. In contrast, the Toyota plant in Cambridge,
Ont.,
is neat and orderly to the point of antiseptic. This is controlled
mayhem.
 For the university’s innaugural bid
for the North American Solar Car Challenge, engineering students
started basically
from scratch, attempting to accomplish in one school term
what competitors take two years to do, with the aim of finishing
top-10 in the 28-entry race. Now, as the race approaches,
the
team believes there’s a reasonable shot at actually
winning.
“
In under nine months, we will have built two cars and become
experts in solar car design, so we will get this done,” emphasizes
Rashaad Sader, project leader. “The stress level is gettting
really high. But as they say, if it wasn’t for the last
minute, nothing would get done.”
Conducted every two years since 1990, the
special edition of the American Solar Challenge travels into
Canada for
the first
time. The 4,050-kilometre route runs north along U.S.
Highway 75 to Winnipeg, then west along the Trans-Canada
Highway
to Calgary.
Dubbed the North American Solar Car Challenge
as the race covers Canadian ground for the first time, it
begins July
17 in Austin,
Texas and finishes in Calgary on July 27. Mandatory
safety testing starts July 10.
Competition includes the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Stanford and Purdue. While
attending the pre-qualification screening in Kansas,
U of C’s engineering
team got a daunting if not intimidating look at
what they’re
up against. The University of Michigan arrived
in a dedicated tractor-trailer resembling a sophisticated
Indy-car operation,
with 21 students accompanying the solar car. U
of C’s
delegation consisted of two students in a van.
The team’s
$300,000 budget, already stretched, comes to an
estimated 25 percent of Michigan’s.
“Classic Calgary underdog,” shrugs
Sader.
So much to do, so little time. For
testing purposes, the U of C team built a fibreglass-body
vehicle with steel chassis and an inferior
alkaline
battery. On a recent Saturday, Colby Bell, heading
up the composites
unit, worked with his team in an engineering
bay on the vehicle. The test car, being readied for
the Calgary
Stampede parade
among other promotional purposes, could be
used in dire
circumstances but would stand negligible
chance of victory due to weight.
So Bell and company aren’t expecting
to enjoy down time over the July 1 holiday
weekend.
Last week, U of C’s team was arranging
shipment of the Kevlar body for the race-version of the car.
Sader, a structural
engineering graduate student, flew to Gander,
Newfoundland on June 14 to supervise construction of the
shell. Beginning
on June 20, it was shipped by ferry to the
mainland, then trucked across the country by students driving
non-stop in shifts.
Once the shell arrived, it was placed
on a heat-treated aluminum chassis, fitted
with
arrays to catch the light,
and equipped with sophisticated solar cells
obtained from Singapore.
The low, flying saucer-styled vehicles
must be powered
solely by converting sunshine into electricity
with photovoltaic, or solar, cells. The
cars operate at
premium levels on
sunny
days and the trick is to store energy for
cloudy weather. The lower the vehicle’s weight, the more efficiently it will
operate. The lithium polymer battery for the race car weighs
21 kilograms, compared with the 72-kilogram battery on the
test car.
“
As one of our drivers said, this car wasn’t designed
to finish in second place,” says
Sader.
A year ago, Joshua Leon, the engineering
professor overseeing the campaign, deplored
the thought
of university teams
rolling past the finish line on campus
without U of C being represented
in the race. So he asked Sader to take
on a seemingly impossible task, boiling
down
to
this instruction: ‘You’ve
got nine months. Go.’
“
During the school year, we had students coming in here between
classes, exams and part-time jobs,” Sader says. “Now
they’re working full-time summer jobs and coming in here
at night.”
As many as 100 students representing
business, kinesiology, computer science
and other
fields, in addition to
engineering, have participated. Now
the student team is down to
a core of about one dozen, plus four
drivers and race support
staff.
In the winter, it seemed the operation’s myriad of different
facets would come together in perfect synchronization. Why,
they might have weeks, even months to test the hybrid version.
If only the Kevlar body had been built when promised, if only
the test engine hadn’t broken down three times, if only
students needn’t study for exams ... Well, that would
have been too easy!
“
We were always hoping certain things wouldn’t happen,
but we were expecting them to anyway,” says Ryan Biffard,
electrical manager for the project. “We were planning
on being done two months ago. Most of our problems came from
external sources, especially manufacturing companies, which
couldn’t deliver products on time.”
They’ve had to iron out plenty of their own wrinkles
too. For instance, an original premise discounted the relation
of high vehicle speed to battery voltage. When they discovered
the theory to be faulty, the power system required a re-design.
”
It was challenging in the first place to design a power system
in a four-month period of time,” says Biffard. “We
re-designed it in a single afternoon.”
If there’s an advantage to the time crunch, it is that
the team knows the car so intimately, problems that pop up
during the race will be assessed and fixed immediately.
“
I wish the community could see the number of hours being put
in,” says Sader. “It’ll be really exciting
that first day of the race. On the other side of it, this team
is so committed to rallying into Calgary, there probably won’t
be any cheering at the start. But there will be a lot of cheering
the day it ends.”
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