Quick-thinking solar car team overcomes repeated challenges to finish in second place at energy-efficient car competition.
It
was Sunday, April 1, the third day of the Shell Ecomarathon Americas 2012, a competition for students to design, build and drive energy-efficient vehicles. Rice’ s entry, an 11.5-foot solar car dubbed the RSC Enterprise, was on track to finish its 10-lap trial within the allotted time frame. Team member Robert Wilson ’12 was documenting the car’s progress from the sidelines.
Even before reaching the track, club members pulled a series of all-nighters at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen to configure individual solar cells that arrived days before the event and had to be painstakingly pieced together into an original solar panel design. Soldering the cells took four or five students working around the clock for about 36 hours, the team estimated. “When we got started we were breaking them left and right,” they said. Gradually the process got more efficient. On the way to the finish line, the team faced numerous other challenges. In their first run, the joule meters provided by Shell to measure the vehicle’s efficiency malfunctioned. Since they did not display the amount of energy gathered by the solar panels, the main criteria for judging, the team had to go again.
Running on Ly n n G o s n e l l a n d M i k e W i l l i a m s
“We were following our strategy to the note,” Wilson said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Did the roof just fall off?’” It was not an April Fool’s joke. On bumpy city streets, the Enterprise’s front-opening hood had caught some air and folded back on its hinge, flooding driver Kerry Wang ’12 in sunlight and causing a slight panic among team members. “We lost 20 percent of our photovoltaics,” said Andrew Owens ’12. “A lot of them were cracked and shattered, but they continued to produce electricity, just not as efficiently as before.” Wang carefully steered the brand new solar convertible off the track. It was a good thing the steering mechanism hadn’t broken — like it had the day before. The Rice Solar Car club endured numerous mechanical and engineering malfunctions to claim a second-place finish in the solar prototype category of the competition, held at Discovery Green in downtown Houston. It was the team’s first competition. The student-run project had started more than two years earlier and evolved into a 16-member club. To finance the project, students raised more than $90,000 from various sources, including a generous gift from Rice alumni Burton ’56 and Deedee Meck McMurtry ’56. The team’s adviser was Andrew Dick, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science. In spring 2011, Dick taught a mechanical engineering class that focused on designing a solar car. In the Shell competition, each team had 10 chances to drive 6 miles (10 laps) within 24 minutes and 15 seconds. Cars were judged not so much for speed as for efficiency in each of the categories, which also included gas, diesel, electric and alternative fuels. More than 130 teams from across the country and abroad competed; Rice’s car was one of eight in the solar prototype category.
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On the second run, the car’s left steering arm attachment broke. “For a couple seconds, my car was wobbling uncontrollably, then it stopped because the wheel turned perpendicular to the direction it was going,” said Wang. “Kind of scary.” Another team offered them a drill press so they could repair the steering attachment; the car was up and running in no time. On their third attempt, one of the car’s two batteries died. The competition required that the vehicle weigh no more than 140 kilograms, or a little more than 300 pounds, including the carbonfiber frame and two battery packs that total about 8 pounds. With a nod to Dr. Seuss, the team named their batteries Thing One and Thing Two. “Thing One lost charge faster than it should have,” Wilson said. And on the fourth round, the roof cantilevered. “Did that just happen?” thought Wang. To get back in the competition, the team had to find a way to secure the car’s solar roof. Their elegant solution involved lanyards and zip ties. “We jerry-rigged the thing,” Wilson said. It took two minutes. Wang got back in the vehicle, and with one hand pulling down the roof and the other steering, he navigated the course to a near-miraculous second-place finish. “We were learning the greatest way possible, by trying something and messing up,” said Owens. Wilson said that fundraising, scheduling, motivating people and other logistics were just as important as the engineering tasks. “This is so much more than an engineering project,” said Owens. “It’s a great opportunity for leadership. It’s like running a small business.” Two team members from this year’s competition — juniors Allison Garza and Joseph Song — will lead the club’s efforts next year. And for Wang, driving the RSC Enterprise was the highlight of his time at Rice. “It was intense, but it was fun.”