Students the Get Green Flag on Solar Car Race
When it comes to high-tech competitions for college students, the race may not be to the swiftest, but the richest.
Three Southland campuses are gearing up for a solar-car shoot-out next year. None has a vehicle ready at this stage, but all have left the starting blocks in the dash for donors.
Cal State Los Angeles even has a big gun concentrating on fund raising for the “Solar Eagle”--Raymond B. Landis, dean of the School of Engineering and Technology.
Cal Poly Pomona might seem more laid-back, with a student in charge of money for its “Solar Flair.” But its fund-raising goal is something else.
Cal State Northridge pretends to play it cool: “We’ll tell students who volunteer for the project in September that they can expect to be the first donors,” says Tim Fox, chairman of the mechanical engineering department.
But Northridge has commitments for key--and costly--components from industry sources that, Fox says, wish to remain anonymous. The car is also nameless at this point.
Cal Poly Pomona is more open about donors, identifying some without indicating the value of the contribution, and Cal State L.A. is frankest of all, naming some donors and amounts. But a hint of cloak-and-dagger tactics pervades the contest.
Some of the designers keep their models covered when photographers show up, and others freely allow pictures--pictures, that is, of a clunky early concept they have no intention of pursuing.
One costly item spurring fund-raisers is the solar cells. The most sophisticated car design would probably be something approximating the GM Sunraycer, a car built by AeroVironment of Monrovia that won the first World Solar Challenge in Australia in 1987.
With state-of-the-art solar cells, that vehicle was able to assume a super-streamlined shape with a very low coefficient of drag--about .125. (The average passenger car today ranges from .5 to 1.0, with some sports models achieving .2 to .3.)
Unfortunately, popular estimates of the investment in GM’s car are in the neighborhood of $8 million. None of the Southland schools contemplates raising that kind of money. Every entry received $5,000 in seed money from GM, which is sponsoring the American race, and $2,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy, but that’s chicken feed even for a modest entry.
Prof. Richard Roberto, head of Cal State L.A.’s team, estimates their project will cost about $100,000. Fox pegs the Northridge investment at $66,000, “but that’s the bare-bones cash outlay,” he said. “It doesn’t figure in the value of salaries for any faculty participating, for example.”
Michael Shelton, mechanical engineering professor at Cal Poly, said his will be an all-student project and therefore difficult to put a price on. However, his wife, Tina, coordinator of the project, said the school has embarked on a $500,000 fund-raising effort. “We’re just $200,000 shy of it now,” she said, “but that’s the cash part.”
Figures for the Sunraycer, as well as projections for any of the college cars, are somewhat amorphous because they involve different ways of estimating the value of man-hours and expertise contributed, as well as components donated.
The race will be held in July over a course 1,800 miles long from Disney World in Florida to GM’s Technical Center near Detroit. Applications were received from universities throughout the country, and 32 were selected on the basis of their potential for mounting a challenging entry. The first, second and third place finishers in the U.S. race will be sent to Australia at GM’s expense to compete in the 1990 World Solar Challenge.
Another big item among components for the cars is the battery pack. Roberto said a set of silver zinc batteries like those used in most of the World Challenge cars would cost at least $13,000 and are relatively short-lived. “You can’t test the car repeatedly with just one set, but I don’t think many schools will be able to afford several sets. Lead acid batteries are much cheaper, but they weigh up to four times as much, so you wouldn’t get the same test results.”
Chester Kyle, a mechanical engineer and founder of the International Human Powered Vehicle Championships, made an analysis of the 1987 World Challenge that identified four important design factors contributing to the performance of the six top cars.
“First” he said, “was panel power. GM was clearly superior (with a) high solar-panel-power output combined with efficient power electronics and a motor that could be overloaded for reasonably long periods without overheating.”
GM also had the lowest aerodynamic drag, lightest weight and was comparable to the others in rolling resistance (tire friction).
However, Kyle pointed out, there was one consideration that stood out before any of the design factors. “Probably most important,” he said, “was to build a machine that kept running reliably under race conditions.”
Or, as Roberto would put it, “You don’t win unless you finish.”
That consideration may help to account for the relaxed atmosphere at Northridge. Fox said the school’s depth of experience in designing, building, testing and entering vehicles in a variety of competitions offers some assurance of reliability for new projects. In a high-mileage contest, for example, the Northridge entry got 1,278 miles per gallon--the only one to break 1,000.
“One of our strong suits is that our students can fabricate almost everything right here. And these competitive events give them a chance to test theory against practice, to interface with industry. That way they get to see the whole picture before they graduate, from concept to product to the marketplace.”
One of them told Fox recently that the Capstone senior design class (where the competition vehicles are designed) was the most rewarding experience of his undergraduate program at Northridge.
Fox added that some preliminary configuration and costing work for the project was done by a few students from last year’s Capstone class in order to write the proposal.
Cal State L.A. and Cal Poly also have experience in competitions, notably the collegiate Mini-Baja off-road race in which the two San Gabriel Valley schools went head-to-head for several years.
But Cal Poly is really going all-out for this one, judging not only by its fund goal but by the quality of its initial proposal. The Sheltons say they heard that theirs was one of the top five proposals, based on how well it responded to the sponsor’s request.
“They had 11 criteria,” Tina Shelton said: “organization, fund raising, concept selection, component acquisition, fabrication, testing, reliability and durability, selection and training of drivers, plans for the logistical aspects of the race and strategies for running the race.”
There’s one thing for sure: students are standing in line to qualify as drivers. “We have to train four,” Roberto said, “and we’ll probably get five ready. A lot of them want to do it, but I don’t think we’ll take more than that.”
