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Solar-Powered Cars Race fron Austin to Calgary
dblizzard writes "The North American Solar Challenge race is about to start. Travelling at speeds of up to 130km/hr (80mph), these teams will race from Austin Texas to Calgary Alberta all with no non-reusable energy. Here's the race link, and here's some really cool photos of the Queens' University car."
Are the start and destination supposed to be ironic (oil vs solar power)?
BlackNova Traders
Non-reusable energy? Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it simply is transferred around. What does non-reusable mean exactly? Do they mean non-renewable?
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Great, so now I can use the same bit of sunlight over and over until I have enough power stored up to finally take over the world!
Solar isn't reusable. There's just a lot of it.
with no non-reusable energy.
And apparently without no double negatives, too!
Why don't they just use the sunlight as direct propulsion? Then they'd go really fast.
There's probably some reason they don't. Those people are really smart.
Are there rules against travelling at close to light speed in these races? Oh, I see, they go throught towns. That must be it.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
here's some really cool photos of the Queens' University car.
Down here in the States, it's hard enough to get equal marriage rights... but in Canada, there is a whole University just for Queens!
Can't the editors do something so simple as spell check a word a 6 year old can spell?
What is Fron? Fron Fron...?? ....From?
.. and I hope it will become a better success than the arctic winter solar car race.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I'll be rooting for my home team.
How much energy does it take to make a solar panel? Once in a while I hear someone say that solar panels take more energy to manufacture than they will produce in their entire lifetime, but I don't buy that without any numbers...
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
I wonder what route they will be taking. But anyways, heres a nice idea of the distance between the two locations from Google Maps
no non-reusable energy
no non-nonsense editing
In other words, gasoline is non-reusable in the sense that you can get work out of it when you burn it, but once it has been burned, it is burnt.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Anyways, find these smart pups and have an open competition. Not only will the smart kids find ways to build things, but they must be economical. It is not like a lab at Motorola with millions of dollars.
And third, patent everything these kids do, by a univeristy or some trusted public group, and let anyone use the patents for free (except Microsoft, fuck them).
The genius of this system is kids love to compete and show off their genius. They will do it all for pride and because it is interesting. It stimulates their mind, they get caught up in it, and they build fantastic things. Meanwhile, everyone else benifits, no monopolies from these new inventions. And maybe the public group that holds these patents could use them as leverage against large companies, to force them to pay a fee, and in some cases to ban them from using the patent for their preditory buisness practices.
This is how a community can help itself without giving one CEO compelete power to ruin lives.
And I hope these kids build things that soon will be used in real cars, to reduce the amount of gasoline needed. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have cars with 100 miles per gallon of gas, and that emitted 1/10th the amount of pollution? It is possible.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
See subject line. The sun is just going down here in Austin, and I see their server is fried. Using the reasoning I have learned here at Slashdot, that means that their server must be solar powered!
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
That will be an impressive feat, with the US Federal highway speed limit of 65, and a Canadian speed limit on major roads up there not much faster; 100km/hr to 120km/hr, if I recall on my last trip?(it was months ago, sorry). Why is it that nobody else is allowed to break the speed limit, but these guys are? Particularly given their vehicles have about zero crashworthyness?
I'm also curious how they plan to keep solar cars from mixing with general traffic; there has been at least one fatal accident involving a solar car (which came apart like paper mache) a few months ago when a solar vehicle was being tested.
Honestly, what was wrong with an enduro race on a closed race circuit? At least then it would be more controllable, and emergency/rescue crews would be barely a minute or two from any participant. There are numerous reasons we do our racing OFF public roads...
Please help metamoderate.
The way the weather has been in Austin this last month, they should have enough power to fly to Calgary... if they don't burst into flames first.
I have a mental image of a non-air conditioned vehicle dodging 18 wheelers on I-35.
Hell on Earth. (Welcome to Texas)
That's not *entirely* true. A turbocharger uses the power from the waste gasses(exhaust) to drive the turbine that then adds boost to the air/fuel mix. So in that sense, the gasoline is used twice ;)
I'm sorry to complain, but Slashdot's quality has really gone to hell lately. To be honest, I don't understand much about the editing process here, but something really needs to change. Between the mis-spellings and constantly late and duplicate articles, I think this web site could stand for some improvement.
too bad it's uphill, but at least most of the route is flat.
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One interesting impact will be that if you fail to make it all the way, you start off receiving more solar radiation (power) at the beginning of the race than you have at the end of the race, as you start closer to the equator than you finish at.
Thus, a system with a slightly better power storage system (battery) and more efficient battery cycles, might have an edge in the race over a more efficient vehicle with a smaller battery storage and/or less efficient battery cycles.
I remember being a founding member of SESCI, Inc. way back when, so this route is really fun
Will in Seattle
I have been on the University of Minnesota Solar Vehicle Project for the past four years and this is the first race that I will be missing due to graduation. To answer your question, it is important to keep the competition going. No, cars are not completely re-designed every year, however constantly rebuilding them allows a proper evolution to occur. The UMN team is particularly interesting because we try to do as much of our own work as possible. Power trackers, motor controller, motor, encapsulating the cells, battery controller, etc, are all desgined by us. This doesn't always guarantee the best results vs. some of our competitors who outsource much of their cars to professional companies, but gives us a great feeling of achivement. Out current car, Borealis III, has few revolutionary improvements over Borealis II, but we've fixed many problems that have plagued us in the past and improved our reliability immensely. If we go back five years ago, the car we had then was dramatically inferrior. Now we have an all digital communication system (BDLC), robust power trackers, and good encapsulation. The carbon fiber body of the car improved a lot too. Before it used to crack after significant wear. For more info, check out the official lwebsite of the UMN Solar Vehicle Project. [http://160.94.140.26/%5D BTW, we are one of the top teams, the last race, which was from Chicago to LA was tough, but we placed second afret UMR (their array generated much more power). There is also a endurance race around a track that happens in Topeka Kansas every year, which we often place first in.
In addition to the other replies to your post, there's the engineering challenge to it.
Lots of us on solar car teams are there because we wanted something classes can't/don't/won't offer: practical experience. You can get all the equations right on the exam, but if you don't know how it connects to the real world, it's no good. For many students, this is one of the few ways to do something fun and challenging that's related to their coursework in some way.
Also, it looks good on a resume. Lots of people would rather hire someone with experience than someone without.
But that's all for the perspective of why the student would want to do it. As for why the race officials want to do it, I'd guess it's mostly the same reasons, it's fun, it's educational, it's good for the environment, and they probably secretly hope that one team someday will come up with an excellent idea with practical effects (if it hasn't happened already).
UMR has won three times now, I think. Before that, they always did pretty well. The solar car team is a reasonably big deal at Rolla, what with there being little else to do in that hellhole of a town. I should know, I was there for 5 years. :P
:)
And if they lose, well, they always have St. Pats in which to drown their sorrows.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.