Blog

On Raindrops

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Lucy Fielding

What shape is a raindrop?

I ask, because CUER’s new concept has been drawing admiring glances and comments for a while now. Yet we still haven’t found quite the right word to describe its shape. We’ve tossed around ideas like ‘teardrop’, ‘cycling-helmet’, ‘fish’, ‘beetle’ and, yes, ‘raindrop’.

The raindrop analogy is an attractive one. People imagine that a raindrop, being mutable, naturally takes on a minimum-drag shape as it falls. This belief is so common that even we fell into the trap: we imagined a raindrop falling from the sky, turning sideways and growing wheels to become a solar car. Unfortunately for us, and for our imagination, the true shape of a raindrop is not at all what we expect:

So nature, apparently, with wilful disregard for drag optimisation, has opted for hamburger couture. Why? Why doesn’t the drop get ‘blown’ into a more aerodynamic shape? It’s a fair question, with a fascinating answer.…
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Science Museum Day 3: Over and out

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Helena Barman

Our third and final day at the Science Museum was a day full of highlights.

It was also the finale to a wonderful festival (High Performance) celebrating the extraordinary achievements of women in science and technology!

Thank you very much from the positive feedback we’ve received. A vast array of people who came to see us: people from Germany, China, France, New York…. Of all ages and experiences from car designers at Peugeot designers to the young solar car engineers at Ardingly College, to the Mums who came on Mother’s Day. Youngsters such as Ava, Freddie, Merlis and Lenny came up with original ideas for future vehicle; they may just have designed us our next solar car. Thank you one and all for coming to see us!

Stomp

We learnt a lot from the public too, their perceptions on solar technology, and how they thought electric and solar vehicles might be incorporated into our future. We also learnt that our Nomex honey comb which we’ll be using in our carbon fibre sandwich is very strong indeed, as tested by our youngest new team members! All looks very scientific! Our materials were also put through more stringent tests. The most challenging being …
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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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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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Electrical Team Blog: Lent Term Weeks 1 – 4

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Yang Lu

Significant progress has been made by the CUER electrical team in the past few weeks. After successfully manufacturing and testing our telemetry boards over the winter break, the team set about finalising the rest of the system.

Driver Controls

The design for the driver controls unit has now been finished. The aim was to keep the interface as simple as possible. The decision was taken to remove all non-essential switches and controls off the steering wheel. This increases the reliability of the steering wheel system (something which caused us issues in 2011), and also helps avoid any accidental driver inputs.

Instead, the key vehicle controls have been mounted on a single unit to the right-hand side of the driver. This contains a large reflexive LCD display to effectively display basic vehicle information to the driver, as well as switches for the on-board controls. More detailed car telemetry information will be monitored and analysed by engineers in the chase car.…
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High Performance at the Science Museum

Posted on February 16, 2013 by pjm206

After all the hard work that goes into slowly piecing Daphne together, it was great to find a prestigious establishment like the London Science Museum approaching us and expressing an interest in our project.

Each half-term, the museum puts on an event called Antenna Live, a hands-on exhibition where the most current and innovative ideas from science and technology are gathered and their concepts shared with museum visitors from around the world. This time the event will be held from the 8^th-10^th of March and exhibitioners can be expected to engage with up to 3000 members of the public per day, so we were delighted when the Museum asked us to get involved! Having kindly been invited to showcase our project, this weekend myself and fellow first-year Lucy Osborne were over the moon to accept an invitation to go down to the museum, in order to have some communication and media training prior to the event.…
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