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American Solar Challenge 2003 Starts
Ryan Kingsbury writes "The world's longest solar car race kicked off to a sunny start today in Chicago! The American Solar Challenge, which is only held every two years, runs 11 gruelling days along historic Route 66. Race updates can be found at the official site. One big surprise was that last year's winner (University of Michigan) didn't make it through prerace qualifications. This will certainly give some lower budget teams a chance at gold. Details of qualifications can be found here."
depends on how they construct the electrical system, and the level of cloudyness. just an overcast day can still produce electricity.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
At the university I attended, IIRC, they got students from the business school to head up a lot of that stuff for SunRayce. It let the engineering students focus on building the damn thing. Actually had students from several areas of study in the university involved with the project.
Looks like they're not even in it this year. Not really surprising, actually. The program was going downhill while I was a student there (didn't work on the project myself).
"Michigan will not be participating in the 2003 American Solar Challenge. While qualifying for the race in Wisconsin, the car suffered steering system failures which did not allow SpectruM to qualify for and enter the race.
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The team is also exploring the possibility of racing SpectruM this October in the World Solar Challenge in Australia, as well as participating in the inaugural 2004 Phaethon Hellas Solar Rally held in Greece before the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens."
umich.edu/solarcar
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Slightly off topic, regarding the parent's link...
Able to scan the whole sky every six months, the Nasa satellite is producing maps of the CMB with unprecedented accuracy.
I'm no physicist, astronomer or the like, but how can they POSSIBLY know if they are even close to being accurate? Accuracy requires one to be as close to the current answer as possible within a reasonable amount of error, but how can they possibly know what that answer is? There's no way to gauge it. (Or is there and I'm just being ignorant/dense/both?)
Just something that leapt out as I read it.
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And back to the topic:
In our time frame, the sun is as renewable as it gets. The chances of this race ever seeing the death of Sol (that is the name of it correct?) is astronomically oh-so-close slim to none. But then, I'm a cynic in that regard. Don't get me wrong, it would be a truly amazing event to witness (though I, myself, will most definitely not see it.. or did you know that already?). However, for that to happen, we need to get passed the threat of annihilating ourselves at the drop of a WMD... I mean hat, and move on technologically. Even then, that would take a major, no astronomical, leap in advancement to be capable of either time travel or living long enough to see the death of our Sun... which is in approximately how many billions of years?
So no need to fear, the sun is MORE than likely to supply us with "unlimited" and "renewable" energy as long as we don't blast ourselves to kingdom-come beforehand. All we have to do is fully harness it.
.unsigged
My wife was in Braidwood IL on Sunday visiting her mom, eating lunch at a restaurant along Route 66. As they ate, they saw seven or eight of the cars go by, with chase cars etc. She said they were all very aerodynamic-looking, and she wondered if they'd be picked up by high winds. Lots of windy weather out there; the previous week there'd been tornado watches next door in Indiana.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
The UM solar car, SpectrUM, has four wheel steering - the rear wheels are servo actuated with the front being mechanical linkages. It is alos a two person car - the tradoff is that you can have a larger solar array if you carry two people.
I got to see them in a test run a week or two ago, and it's very odd to see the car moving in one direction, but pointing 10-20 degrees off its path. The race page indicates that steering failure caused the car not to finish the prequalifier - probably due in part to their more complex system.
As a note, the previous car did have four wheel steering, but the rear two wheels were locked during the races. I understand the reason is that the fairings (covers to keep wind drag down) became too large and the drag was greater than the benefit of having four wheel steering.
There is a ton of technology in the cars - both in and on the cells and within the shell - which you can't see because they like to keep an edge over other teams. Even though the cells appear to be flat on the back they are designed to take light in at a particular angle (or as close as one can get to that angle) and so I assume the four wheel steering is to enable them to point the cells more effectively into the sun.
-Adam
Funny you should mention that. A buddy of mine is on the Cal Poly team and he was telling me that they had several overcast days last week, which made it impossible for them to complete the final qualifying round, which was to go a certain distance in a set number of days. As a result, there were very few qualifying teams in the stock class race. The judges ended up lowering the distance requirement so there would be more teams in the final race.
At "Sunrayce 99" (ASC used to be called Sunrayce) there was severe rain on 8 out of 10 race days. I was there. Average speed for the race dropped to about 20mph. From D.C. to Orlando, FL it was one wet mess.
List of prior races.
Newer and more expensive cells (triple junction, GaAs) can manage to extract power even if it's cloudy. Also, solar cars have maximum power point trackers to extract maximum amount of power from the array as well as battery to run the car off from. For instance, during the qualifier a month back at Topeka Kansas, Midnight Sun Solar Car from University of Waterloo qualified for the race running solely off the battery power.
Cloudy days will put a damper on things and will limit the speed at which the solar cars will travel, but it doesn't mean that they'll be dead in the water either.
The Dell-Winston Solar Challenge starts tomorrow just outside of Austin, Texas and will be travelling across The South to central Florida...