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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."
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).
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