Blog

Women in Engineering- Times of Change

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Sarah Barrington

This is the second in a series of posts by some of the women in CUER, writing about how they came to study engineering, what their experiences have been and how we can encourage more girls to pursue science, engineering, technology and maths. These posts were inspired by the amazing reception we had at the High Performance Antenna Live festival at the Science Museum on International Women’s Day.

Part 1

Whenever my friends or colleagues ask me, so what exactly is engineering? Even I struggle to answer.

Yes, the Oxford Dictionary defines it as ‘the branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and structures’, but what does this tell us of the massive impact engineers have on pretty much everything in our everyday lives? The hard work and meticulous calculation they implement in order to better society as a whole?

So this might explain why I didn’t grow up expecting to be an Engineer- I was never really sure what I’d be letting myself in for. I’m not from a particularly scientific background, although my dad has been a fantastic engineer all his working life. Therefore to me, engineering was just something …
Read more →

Posted in Blog, Headline, News, Outreach, Students | Leave a comment

Mechanical Team Update

Posted on May 19, 2013 by pjm206

It has been a while since the last mechanical team update. There have been two reasons for this. The first is that the 4^th years on the team have sat our Final Exams at Cambridge, the second being in the little spare time we have had, we have been busy building the car.

As the exams are now over and our 4^th year projects are coming to a close (my first draft was just handed to my supervisor today) we thought it was time for an update.

So what has been going on:

Roll bar manufacture:

Marshall Aerospace kindly agreed to bend the tube for our roll bars at a meeting on a cold and blustery morning back in the beginning of March. Material was ordered and by the end of April we got the call to say the roll bars were complete. I took an afternoon off revision to cycle out to Cambridge Airport to collect them.

Alex Robinson- our Systems Designer and general hero with a lathe then finished the assembly of the front roll bar, which had had to be manufactured in two parts due to machining constraints. He also manufactured some inserts for the …
Read more →

Posted in 2013 Car, Blog, Build, Cambridge, Headline, Mechanical, News, Students, Testing | 2 Comments

Looking ahead to WSC 2013

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Roger Poolman

Now in race year, we want to take a quick look at the World Solar Challenge itself. The WSC is a biennial race that first took place in 1987. Since then, the reach of the race has grown, and the 2011 instalment saw 37 teams compete from 20 countries – almost twice as many countries as were represented in the 2005 race. In the same period, solar cell technology and lightweight manufacturing technologies, including the use of carbon fibre, have greatly advanced. To ensure that the competition continues to present opportunities for innovation and achievement, the WSC has improved its regulations governing race vehicles.

This year there were some significant changes to the regulations governing the most competitive class of solar vehicles, the Challenger class. The primary change was a move to four wheels, an important one given the recent domination of three-wheeled designs. Not since 1996 when the Honda Dream took the top spot has a team won this class with a four-wheeled vehicle. Secondly, the regulations governing the driver’s head space and visibility have been tightened. The new quantitative restrictions bring them up to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s transport guidelines and the Australian Government National …
Read more →

Posted in 2013 Car, Blog, Headline, News, WSC | 1 Comment

Women in Engineering – Women of Valour

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Lucy Fielding

This is the first in a series of posts by some of the women in CUER, writing about how they came to study engineering, what their experiences have been and how we can encourage more girls to pursue science, engineering, technology and maths. These posts were inspired by the amazing reception we had at the High Performance Antenna Live festival at the Science Museum on International Women’s Day.

Apparently, I’m a ‘woman engineer’.

I’ve always found this phrasing a little unwieldy, and it’s starting to crop up more and more: ‘woman lawyer’, ‘woman doctor’ (not to be confused with ‘gynaecologist’), ‘woman scientist’. I’m not sure when people started specifying the genders of their educated professionals like this. After all, we don’t talk about a ‘man teacher’, ‘man secretary’, or ‘man nurse’. The closest we get is ‘male nurse’, which at least employs an adjective. Although I’m not sure that makes it any better.

Nevertheless – I am, indeed, an engineer who is a woman. I didn’t always intend to be. I was six when Jurassic Park came out, and this was when I first learned you could do dinosaurs as a job. Of course, while growing up, I also toyed …
Read more →

Posted in Blog, Outreach, Students | 13 Comments

Building a solar car battery

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Daniel Chambers

It’s not immediately obvious to many people that solar cars should have batteries. If you get all your power from the sun, why do you need to lug around all that extra weight?

There are several reasons for having a battery in a solar-powered car, and most are inter-related.

To be able to operate when there isn’t any sunlight
To decouple the car’s performance from the instantaneous weather conditions
To provide a stable high-voltage bus to drive the motor, and “hang” the rest of the electrical systems off.

The WSC 2013 regulations permit solar vehicles to carry an energy storage system (in this case a battery) whose maximum allowable cell mass depends upon the chosen cell chemistry. If you use lead acid battery cells (the type you’ll find in your car at home) you’re allowed up to 125kg in Challenger class. If you choose to use lithium ion battery cells (the type you’ll find in your laptop) you’re only allowed 21kg. Why the big difference?

Lithium ion cells are extremely energy dense. That means there’s a huge amount of energy stored inside a small mass (and a small volume). The aim of the regulations is to make sure that …
Read more →

Posted in 2013 Car, Blog, Build, Electrical, Energy, Renewable technology, WSC | 1 Comment

Out of Thin Air: A Rediscovered Hybrid

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Lucy Fielding

A car that Runs On Air!

Sort of.

The Peugeot Hybrid Air (not to be confused with a Hybrid Air Vehicle) is the first modern attempt at creating a petrol-hydraulic hybrid car. Sure, it’s not quite the YeZ, but it nevertheless marks a welcome diversion from the current crop of electric hybrids. I thought its release this month was rather well-timed, following on from my last post about electric cars and the comments that ensued. Someone made the point that electric vehicles aren’t the panacea that some make them out to be, and that’s absolutely right. There are still many challenges involved in developing a truly green car, and we as engineers have to be careful that our solutions don’t create additional problems.…
Read more →

Posted in Auto Technology, Blog | 2 Comments

Gadget Show Live at the NEC

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Anastasia Bykova

Another exciting week in the world of Cambridge University Eco Racing! A few team members are having fun with the press and the general public, whilst the rest are extremely busy trying to balance working for their degrees and building the solar car.

All this week we are displaying Endeavour and the model of our latest vehicle at the Gadget Show Live in the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham.

We have already had a great few days at the Show, meeting hundreds of enthusiastic and interesting people, as well as learning about new products. There is still time to come up and see us this weekend, but otherwise – I am sure that we will be somewhere else quite exciting again soon.

Keep following us on twitter @CUERSolarTeam for more updates.…
Read more →

Posted in Blog, Events, Outreach | Tagged aleksi, anastasia bykova, andrew zhao, birmingham, Endeavour, Gadget Show Live, NEC, outreach, yang | Leave a comment

Night at the Museum

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Alice Taylor

There is no experience that quite matches walking through a deserted museum.

Let alone walking through a museum with a solar powered car that has raced across the Outback twice.

As I’m sure you are aware, dear reader, Endeavour recently took a trip to the London Science Museum.

Arguably the most challenging part of the weekend was getting Endeavour in and out the exhibition space. We were based in the Antenna Live gallery which has a large amount of seats fixed to the floor. Great for weary parents. Less good for manoeuvring a 240kg solar powered car into position at 9 o’clock at night.

But if CUER can build a car as good as our new concept, we can get Endeavour into the London Science Museum. Right?…
Read more →

Posted in Blog, Outreach | Leave a comment

The Future of: Solar Cars

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Helena Barman

Last week we hosted an outreach event in the Engineering Department, a seminar by a number of our senior team members entitled ‘The Future of Solar Cars’. Over 50 people came, a large number of them were 6th formers, who were keep to find out what goes into designing a solar car and the wider context of sustainable transport for the future. It was great to inspire a mixture of sixth-formers, parents, engineers and children from the Cambridge area. Thank you all very much for coming, your challenging questions at the end definitely kept us on our toes!

…
Read more →

Posted in Blog, Outreach, Students | Leave a comment

Mechanical Team Blog Post- Lent Week 8

Posted on March 23, 2013 by pjm206

So that is it, another term at Cambridge is over all too soon! Huge amounts of progress have been made! Sorry this post is a little late. As always with the end of term, there are many distractions tying up loose ends, handing in coursework and planning revision for my final exams (which start within a month!). It is strange to say that I will never attend another Cambridge undergraduate lecture, never have to do an examples paper again and never do lab work again. Fortunately it is not quite an end of an era yet. I still have my 4^th year project to complete next term (the crash analysis of the car), and CUER still has plenty of challenges to throw my way!

Nostalgia over – onto an update of our progress: