2013 Car

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

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

Members of the mechanical and electrical team meet to discuss progress.…
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Science Museum Day 2: The Ultimate Objective

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Sarah Barrington

Our second day at the Science Museum saw a significantly less hectic start to the day. After quickly setting up our exhibit and facing another hoard of photographs with Endeavour (no, we can’t ‘pose like Charlie’s Angels’!) we were set to face another busy day sharing our project with hundreds more excited museum visitors.

Our first visitors were a group of primary school children who were incredibly bright and enthusiastic and came up with some great questions to test our knowledge of the car. They also enjoyed having a look at all of the samples we’ve brought with us this weekend; examining a few examples of the materials we’re using on the car and also having a look at some of the tyres we considered when designing it.…
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Science Museum Day 1: One-and-a-Half Engineers

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Lucy Fielding

Never have I felt more solidarity with the cast of Jurassic Park than I did yesterday evening. After a two-hour session packing the Land Cruiser and collecting Endeavour, Technical Director Yang and I arrived at Lord’s Bridge Farm. It was dark. It was pouring with rain. There was mud everywhere. Through this all, I squelched, attempting to unlock stiff gates and drag them open without falling into muddy puddles or tripping over the rusty remains of long-dead radio telescopes or being eaten by a tyrannosaur. All this for a sample of carbon fibre – and we were off to the London Science Museum. Two and a half hours behind schedule.

All in all, not the best start to what should be a fantastic weekend. CUER has been invited to the Science Museum to participate in a three-day festival entitled High Performance – a celebration and a promotion of women in science, engineering and technology. Today is International Women’s Day, an appropriate date to launch the festival, and this is a great way to highlight the achievements and potential of women in male-dominated fields.

…
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Mechanical Team Blog- Lent Term Week 7

Posted on March 7, 2013 by pjm206

Build Progress:

Steve and Thomas welcome you to our new build workshop.

This week, a stiffener (which also acts as the steering rack mounting block) was fitted to the chassis.

…
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Mechanical Team Blog: Lent Term Week 6

Posted on March 1, 2013 by pjm206

Part Machining:

The machining of a wheel to house our motor began with its turning on a lathe. While internal details still require milling into it, the block of aluminium I showed you last week now looks like a wheel!

It went from looking like this:

Via this:

To this:

The quality of the machining is amazing. I must say a huge thank you to the technicians at the Engineering Department’s machine shop for doing such a fantastic job.

…
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Posted in 2013 Car, Aero, Blog, Build, Cambridge, Mechanical, News, Testing | Leave a comment

E-Luminate Festival

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Keno

When was the last time you thought about light? As our designs are progressing quickly from wacky ideas to a full race vehicle, light is something that we’ve all been thinking about increasingly: “How can we track the sun better to get a bit more light?”; “How will light affect the temperatures inside the car?”; “How will the car perform under harsher Australian light?”. However, it occurred to us last week that not many people actually stop to think about the stuff that is everywhere and all around us: light.

Last week was the first ever E-Luminate Festival. This was a five-day light festival in Cambridge, celebrating the collaboration between light and clean technology. Dotted around Cambridge were greenhouses, churches, streets, shop windows and even parts of the Grand Arcade Shopping Centre, all bathed in beautiful light displays and light based artwork for five days to celebrate the festival.

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Mechanical Team Blog- Lent Week 5

Posted on February 22, 2013 by pjm206

Build progress:

Bulkhead consolidation, which has been ongoing for the past 3 weeks, is almost complete. One more session on this is needed in a couple of weeks time to complete this, however the critical parts of the car’s structure are now at full strength.

The rear suspension mounting plate has also been added to the car. This part carries the highest load of any part of the chassis and as a result weighs a couple of kilos. The good news is the chassis is still under our weight target even now it has been fitted to the car.…
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