Students

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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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 …
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Posted in Blog, Outreach, Students | 11 Comments

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!

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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 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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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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Posted in 2013 Car, Blog, Events, Outreach, Renewable technology, Students | 1 Comment

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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What Does It Take To Win?

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Keno

What does it take to win? It’s such a simple question yet finding the answer, that golden winning formula isn’t that straightforward. Around the world as we speak, over 30 solar car teams from Holland to Japan are working around the clock trying to figure this out. At CUER, we think we may have just found the winning formula.

Thinking outside the box. Solar car designs have stagnated for the past 10 years; every team was essentially designing the same flat tabletop car. We’ve taken on the World Solar Challenge this year with the aim to win and to win through innovation. Countless hours have been invested creating, modelling and designing our concept, Daphne. Daphne is a welcome break from traditional designs using aerodynamic performance as the main design driver. Her sleek aerodynamics and tear drop shell will reduce the amount of power we use to over come air resistance. Space grade solar cells and sun tracking technology means we will get a bit more power from the sun whilst using the same area of solar cells (up to 20% more).…
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