Composites

Chocks away!

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Keno

“Impossible is simply the opinion of those who doubt. “

Today we marked a huge milestone in our bid to win the World Solar Challenge! It’s been a long time coming, and a lot of hard work – but we did it. Today was the day we drove our car under her own power for the first time.

On a gloriously sunny afternoon we rolled our car out of the workshop for the first time. At our testing location near Cambridge we were eager for the first rolling test. A testing team of ten of us came together to be a part of the precious moment.

It’s one thing to design a car on a piece of paper, but something completely different to actually go and build one. After a few months of contending with unexpected delays, exams and negotiations across language barriers (Ich habe ein bisschen Deutsch gelernt), we finally had a fully functioning car!

It was also a chance to test out driver ergonomics for real. Unfortunately, none of our carefully selected (tiny) drivers were available for this test and all of us were about 6 foot tall! With Stephen “The Stig” Pendrigh being the smallest person present …
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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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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 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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Inspire & Innovate – CUER & Ardingly

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Keno

Building any type of vehicle is not a simple task; it requires knowledge about mechanics, dynamics, electrics, power and safety. This year, we’re celebrating 6 years of designing, building and racing solar cars. The experience and expertise we’ve picked up along the way have really placed us in a position where we can start from a blank sheet of paper and push the boundaries with our latest design, codenamed Daphne. With a chassis weighing just 20kg, we’re all excited to get Daphne rolling in the coming weeks.

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Posted in 2013 Car, Aero, Affinity, Blog, Build, Cambridge, Composites, Electrical, Outreach, Students | Leave a comment

Mechanical Team Blog: Lent Term Weeks 3 and 4

Posted on February 12, 2013 by pjm206

It has been a very busy two weeks for the mechanical team. As a result I did not have time to write a blog last week, so here goes with a two week catch up on what we have been up to:

Build progress

Over last weekend, 22 different team members worked shifts to progress the final stage of lay up on the chassis. This work is required to consolidate the bulkheads (which so far have been glued into place) with the outer skin. Wet layup of carbon sheets around the joints will allow the loads to transfer between parts effectively without causing failure. Work on this will continue for the next two or three weeks.

CUER continued our outreach activities over the weekend by showing students from Ardingly College around our facilities. Ardingly are looking to build their own solar car in the next few years, a fantastic project to get the next generation of engineers excited about the issues that matter. As part of their tour they came to see some of our wet layup and got to see our new car take shape!

…
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Mechanical Team: Lent Term Week 2

Posted on January 30, 2013 by pjm206

Week two is done. We are 1/4 of the way though term already!

Thankfully the temperatures have been rising (ever so slightly) and the snow has been melting which made manufacturing this weekend a little more bearable for the ever increasing number of volunteers.

As with any project, things never go perfectly. In the ideal world, you do all the problem solving at the design stage and then carry out this plan at manufacturing. As any person with real business experience knows, some rework is inevitable on a prototype build and you have to have your problem solving cap on at all times!

Lent12 (13)

You can clearly see a gap between the chassis and door in the photo above. Unfortunately, both door and chassis had warped slightly in the autoclave, so getting to two surfaces to mate perfectly required some careful consideration. This was the problem that we had to solve this weekend.…
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Mechanical Team: Lent Term Week 1

Posted on January 20, 2013 by pjm206

The snow welcomed us back to Cambridge this week and also marked the return of my weekly blog!

We are in the year of WSC 2013… Time to get excited.

Allot has happened over the holidays. As you will have seen from the blog we made the chassis at the National Composites Centre. Can I extend a huge thank you to all of the members of staff there who made our students feel so welcome and helped us complete our task.

Over the holidays we also had our Kickstarter running, successfully raising over £10 000 for the car’s canopy in 40 days. This is being ordered in the next couple of weeks! If you missed our getting your name on the car with the Kickstarter, fear not, you can still donate to Name-On-Car at www.cuer.co.uk/name-on-car. As usual £10 will get you name printed on the side of the car!

So what is in store for the mechanical blog this term? Well we are targeting a rolling car by the end of the term, a mere 8 weeks away. A huge amount is still required to be done before then, but since when has that put us off?

So what …
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CUER- A Fresh(er’s) Perspective

Posted on December 23, 2012 by pjm206

Finally, it’s Christmas! After managing to endure the whirlwind of my first 8 weeks at university this is a welcome chance to have some time out, revise and of course, reflect upon the fantastic opportunities that this intense term at Cambridge has provided me with. Yet looking back I can honestly say that, amongst the inevitable torrent of highs and lows, the best part for me was without doubt signing up to CUER.

Having naively joined the team on a whim within my first 2 weeks of studying, I was very uncertain of what to expect. I had comparatively minimal engineering experience, was pretty sure I would be the only girl present and felt as though I would probably be rendered useless to the team. It’s fair to say I could not be more wrong! Although initially daunting, sitting in my first mechanical team meeting surrounded by such a mixture of incredibly bright, passionate people soon brought me to the realization that I’d made a great decision.

To this day, the team spirit is a main contender as to why I have enjoyed my time with CUER so much. The genuine buzz and excitement surrounding the new ‘game-changing’ design was …
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Build Team Blog – Bristol Day 5

Posted on December 9, 2012 by Keno

After a good long day’s work yesterday, we had managed to catch up with quite a bit of the build work. With just the upper half of Daphne to bag up this morning in time for our 11 am autoclave slot and also, not wanting the team to burn out from exhaustion, we decided to have an extra half an hour in the morning to sleep, rest or pack, ready to go home.

This didn’t quite go to plan however, it just happened to be the day where all the refuse trucks in Bristol were out and the traffic was horrendous! Leaving 30 minutes later meant we also spent 30 minutes sitting in traffic arriving after 8:30.…
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