To drive the Stuart Highway, the 3000km stretch of road which runs between Darwin in the north of Australia and Adelaide in the south, is a test of the endurance of any vehicle. For the World Solar Challenge, the objective is simple: to complete this route in a little over 6 days, using only energy collected from the sun. As an undergraduate starting university in 2007, I had little doubt that to be part of a team which would compete in this event was an opportunity I couldn’t afford to miss.
A little under four years later, I flew out to Darwin with 11 other recently graduated engineers from the University of Cambridge for the 2011 Veolia World Solar Challenge. By this point our team had already built a car which had competed in the 2009 race (the World Solar Challenge is run every two years), and we were using the same car again although we had made several significant changes. In 2009 the car had suffered major problems with its battery and the reliability of the electrical systems, so we had fixed these issues and also made major aerodynamic improvements to the canopy and wheel fairings. Nonetheless, we knew …
Read more →