Rivalry Heats Up : Engineering Students Compete in Building Solar-Powered Cars
Working on just three hours of sleep, Tai Nuyen spent his lunchtime soldering wires to connect wafer-thin solar cells that cover the race car he and his Cal State Los Angeles engineering colleagues feverishly were building.
Above him a huge board detailed a lengthy “to-do” list that must be completed before the solar-powered vehicle can take its first competitive trial run in Phoenix on Saturday.
“My internal body clock is all screwed up. But I’m psyched. Everybody is psyched,” said 24-year-old Nuyen, one of the drivers of “Solar Eagle II,” which looks like a futuristic soapbox derby entry.
At Cal Poly Pomona, a rival team was also laboring away with the intensity of a Rose Parade float construction crew on New Year’s Eve. In a warehouse-sized workshop where the “Intrepid” is under construction, 21-year-old Vishal Gupta laid out long strips of solar cells to be wrapped around the vehicle’s flying-wedge-shaped shell.
Many a night “people have slept right here,” mechanical engineering senior Gupta said, looking around the lab where more than a dozen of his fellow volunteers labored away as midnight approached. “I have my sleeping bag in my office,” said Mike Shelton, Cal Poly Pomona mechanical engineering professor and Intrepid project director, as he monitored the work.
Obsessed and addicted, students and faculty at Cal State L.A. and Cal Poly Pomona are devoting day and night to prepare for Saturday’s qualifying matches against eight other schools in the Western United States. The school entries that meet minimum design and speed standards will compete in a weeklong 1,000-mile collegiate race that starts June 20 and goes from Texas to Minnesota.
Cal State L.A. and Cal Poly Pomona have developed an intense rivalry over who will be the best in Southern California, if not the nation, in making these essentially pollution-free vehicles that run on no more power than it takes to use a hair dryer. No other schools from the Southland are competing.
“It’s a very friendly rivalry,” said Pomona’s Tina Shelton, who admits that her team once put a carload of balloons and a “Baby on Board” sign in the car of Raymond B. Landis, dean of Cal State L.A.’s engineering and technology department.
“We feel a real pressure to beat our sister institution down the road,” said Cal State L.A. engineering professor Richard Roberto, whose troops anonymously sent Pomona a plaque that declared Cal Poly has the second-best solar car in California.
The cross-county rivalry began in 1990 when the two universities competed in the first collegiate solar car race, which wentfrom Florida to Michigan. Cal State L.A. finished fourth in a field of 32, beating more prestigious schools such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford--and Cal Poly Pomona, which finished 10th.
The competition intensified when the two Southern California universities traveled to an Australian race. That time, they finished eight minutes apart in an eight-day event, with Cal State L.A. finishing one place ahead of Cal Poly Pomona.
To build the cars and to race them in places such as Australia has been an unparalleled opportunity for Cal State L.A.’s Ricardo Espinosa.
“I’ve been very lucky. Very few people in the world get a chance to . . . race across Australia in a solar car,” said the 24-year-old mechanical engineering senior from South Pasadena, who is a driver for his team. “You’re learning things you won’t learn in the classroom--real engineering.”
And what Espinosa and his schoolmates learn by building solar cars, he said, is catapulting them into the future of engineering.
The race cars are similar in basic mechanics to all-electric cars that are expected to be mass-marketed in the mid-1990s. The difference is that solar car batteries are powered by the sun instead of connection to an electric current.
Hundreds of tiny solar cells--as many as 1,600 are on the Cal State L.A. vehicle and 1,100 on the Cal Poly Pomona one--collect the sunlight, which is converted to electrical
energy that is stored in a series of batteries much like ones in ordinary cars.
These batteries provide the power for the ever-so-quiet lightweight motors that drive belts and chains that move the wheels. This time, both Cal State L.A. and Cal Poly Pomona have built three-wheel vehicles that rely on heavy-duty bicycle tires.
The tight driver’s compartment includes a steering wheel with a throttle and a braking-system lever.
To design and construct all of this requires “putting theory into practice, and that’s hard” and time-consuming, Espinosa said.
The students design the vehicles, conduct tests in wind tunnels, build the molds, bodies, frames and shells. They scavenge parts where they can.
As an example of the ingenuity required, Cal State L.A.’s Roberto devised a brake fluid container from a Fuji film canister. Because it is clear plastic, it allows for a quick visual inspection to check the fluid level.
Cal Poly already has had to cope with two major setbacks. One cost them 10 weeks of work last fall. An accidental fire burned a mold of the vehicle’s outer shell. And that February the project’s student leader, Dave Erikson, died in a downhill skiing accident.
For both schools, the projects-- each involving dozens of volunteers--are labors of love.
The universities don’t contribute cash for the projects, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not counting the unpaid labor, Cal State L.A. officials say the first car required $250,000 in donations.
Donors have included local utilities, high-tech firms and transportation industry interests such as TRW, Southern California Edison Co., the Automobile Club of Southern California and the os Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Cal Poly Pomona hopes to raise about $400,000 to build this year’s car. Already major donations have been contributed by American Honda Motor Co. and Lockheed Aircraft Service Division, and Applied Solar Energy Corp.
“Every screwdriver, every tool has to be donated,” Shelton said.
Faculty members do not get paid extra. The students, in most cases, get no classroom credit.
The long hours take a toll. “It’s a terrible pace. I can’t keep it up forever,” said Cal State L.A.’s Roberto, who at age 55 has no children and lives in Eagle Rock with his wife, who he described as understanding and supportive.
The relationships within the project intensify and grow. “It’s like a second family,” said Cal Poly Pomona English major Winnona Scott, a 20-year-old junior who helps to coordinate non-engineering aspects of the project.
But in some cases, relationships outside the project have fallen apart.
Cal Poly instructor Don VandeGriff calls the project “the ultimate birth control device.”
Pomona project director Mike Shelton is married to graduate engineering student Tina Shelton. “I’m sure if we both weren’t working on the project,” he said, “we’d have a rough marriage now.”
Mike Monte, a part-time grocery-store checkout clerk in Norwalk, is like many Cal Poly and Cal State L.A. students who have to juggle relationships, a job, classroom studies and the project. “Your grades tend to go down. But I wouldn’t still be here if the payoff weren’t worth it.”
Mike Shelton said he has received complaints from other faculty members that his project volunteers aren’t studying as they should. “I’ve been feeling real guilty about the grades. The students have been learning a lot. But I don’t want to see it hurt their grades.”
Regardless, students and faculty alike say the project puts them at the cutting edge of problem-solving on thorny issues that face the world’s environment and the nation’s transportation industry.
“I’d like to do something to help the environment,” said Cal State L.A.’s Espinosa, one of his team’s drivers, who wants a career in alternative fuel vehicles. “I feel engineers owe that to the environment.”
Averaging speeds of about 40 m.p.h in the races, the minimally polluting solar cars are by no means practical for today’s freeway driver, but Espinosa said the vehicles do represent “steppingstones” to the future.
California requires auto makers to start selling “clean cars” in the state by 1998. General Motors and other manufacturers are already working on variations of electric cars. Both GM and the Department of Energy have been heavily involved in sponsoring the collegiate solar racing, which got its impetus from the 1987 racing success of an innovative solar electric car, Sunraycer, created by the Monrovia firm, AeroVironment.
Beyond their goals of besting one another in races, faculty and students at both Cal State L.A. and Cal Poly Pomona speak of even more prideful goals.
“I want to prove that our engineers are as good as anybody else’s in the world,” said Pomona’s Mike Shelton.
Landis of Cal State L.A. said he wants to show that ethnic diversity can translate into teamwork and brilliance.
He said his school, which draws a majority of its 19,400 students from ethnic minorities and whose solar car team has student volunteers representing more than a dozen countries, intends to show that it “can match or excel beyond the level of students anywhere.”
