Nuna 3 wins World Solar Cup for the 3rd Time

jberends writes "The Dutch TU Delft team wins for the third time in a row the World Solar Challenge in Australia. The average speed of Nuna 3 was 102.75 km/h over the 3021 km strech which is the first time that an average speed above 100 km/h is achieved in the Challenge. It is also the first time in the history of the race that a team wins 3 times in a row."

Comments

History

[MyLongNickName]

I was amazed to see that this race has been run since 1987. In the first race, the average speed was about 67 kph (41 mph, I think). The last race was completed in excess of 105kph. About a 50% improvement.

Does anyone with more info than the web site know what has accounted for the improvement? Are we just seeing lighter materials? More efficient solar sails? More efficient transfer of solar energy to kinetic?

Just curious :)

Actually 105 km/hr

[karvind]

On the second day the Nuna 3 covered 835 km, at an avarage speed of 105 km/hr, which is also single-day record for the World Solar Challenge.

Congradulations

[PktLoss]

The speed an engineering involved are really impressive. I'm actually surprised that a solar power car can make it up to those speeds, let alone average 100KM/h. Sounds like an awesome way to save on Gas! (when it's sunny, if only the car was street legal, etc).

Congrats team Nuna!

Three times in a row?

[Anonymous Coward]

While winning the race is indeed an accomplishment, I think the "Three Times in a Row" comment needs some perspective. Accoridng to the link, the race started in 1987 and was run every three years for the first few times. Now, it is a biennial event. So, by my rough guess (note that the "history" site is not clear), this event has only been run about eight or nine times. It's not like there have been 40 or so races in the past....

Not without flemish women

[laurensv]

Yes, but not without our 2 lovely Flemish girls: Anne-Marie and Veronique.
Although Laura isn't half bad either.

Speed limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there no speed limit in Australia? Here in Europe, 90 km/h is the maximum you are allowed to drive outside cities on normal roads.

Fuel cell rather than battery?

[starseeker]

Just a curosity question (I don't know much about the details of this process) but I was wondering if it might be more efficient to replace the battery component of a solar car with a fuel cell arrangement, and have any excess solar power available split water into hydrogen and oxygen? http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/proj_production_deliv ery.html#split I know batteries are a major source of weight issues, but I don't know how H2O splitting compares in terms of energy recovery to battery storage. Anybody happen to know if the tradeoff could be advantageous?

Re:Fuel cell rather than battery?

[floormasn56]

I wish there was more info on the amount of power required to convert water to hydrogen vs MPG. I saw one guy in WIRED magazine say the amount of electrical power required to convert water to hydrogen to move a car 300 miles is measured in MEGAWATTS. Is there any more info on this?

Re:Fuel cell rather than battery?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The vanadium oxidation-state fuel cell looks like a better candidate than the hydrogen/oxygen/water cycle. Seems to be under development currently.

The problem with solar cars is that the amount of sunlight striking them isn't adequate: A square yard is only getting about 1 1/3 HP worth of power in direct noon sunlight, BEFORE conversion inefficiencies (which lose maybe 4/5 of it just for starters).

Now you CAN get to freeway speeds with an ultrastreamlined vehicle, on a nearly level surface, running under the clear skys and on the dry pavement of the driest continent on the planet. But that's not going to haul loads up mountain passes in a forest, or do much of ANYTHING in northern lattitude, perpetually-cloudy, often wet or snow-covered places like Washington, Oregon, Michigan, Wisconsin, ...

Solar powered cars - with the solar cells ON the car - are an interesting toy. They might advance some parts of vehicle technology significantly, and possibly lead to practical stored-power alternative-energy powered vehicles. But don't expect a sun-car as practical transportation in the future.

If self-collecting sun powered vehicles were practical I'd think evolution would already have produced sun-powered ambulatory beings above the level of the flatworm/algae symbiosis.

Re:Rules for next year's competition

[Ungrounded Lightning]

About the only justification for a SUV is either having a pet elefant to feed or having an incredibly big ass in which case you indeed have better things to worry about.

A city person shows his elitist provincialism.

The main purpose for SUVs is to provide taansport and cargo carrying capacity for people living in, working in, or having to travel to - a site outside a city, especially if off the paved road network - or the road network at all - but also if weather is a problem (mud, snow, ice, mountainous terrain, ...). These regions can be inaccessable to other vehicles for months at a time, and require prohibitive transport time and risk (vehicular damage or disablement, "getting stuck", injurious or fatal accidents such as off-a-cliff/into-the-river/getting-stuck-with-no-h elp) when they ARE accessable.

Some specialized areas: Doctors in rural areas, firefighting in wilderness areas, etc.

The "sports" part is because they're also useful for transport to wilderness areas for recreation or food gathering: fishing, hunting, camping, hiking. (Of course some of these are things left-wind elitists would like to ban altogether, others things they would restrict to people who hike in, making them inaccessable to the handicapped, infirm, or those who have full-time jobs and can't spare the extra time to make the hike. Forests and wildlife are only the rich and body-beautiful ubermensch, right?)

A big use: The "small truck" for farms and ranches. For many things it's better than even a pickup: gets into smaller places, less expensive to run, etc.

It's also much more fuel efficient than a pickup, van, or a compact "sporty" car. (Our Cherokee - the only one of our vehicles that can make the trip from our townhouse to our rural house - does as well in mountains with two passengers and a full cargo load as the little Eagle Talon with no load and one passenger - and beats an unloaded Aerostar with just the driver on level freeways by 6 MPG.

The main reason SUVs are so popular in cities ("Mall Terrain Vehicles"), though, is an unintended consequence of the governments' attempts to improve auto mileage and move people onto inadequate mass transit.

The CAFE standards killed the station wagon - the most efficient of the large-family utility vehicle classes. (i.e. take the kids to school or the scout troop on an outing, cary a weeks groceries home, tote appliances and small amounts of home-improvement construction material, haul larger amounts in a trailer, or a recreational trailer such as a travel trailer or boat trailer.) The things masquerading as a station wagon these days are NOT the same thing, and nowhere near as capable.

With a REAL station wagon no longer available, people with kids and a week's shopping to haul and/or trailers to tow switched to the next bigger vehicle type: The SUV. (It's a "truck" for the mileage regulations - the smallest and most fuel efficient of the commercial-cargo rated vehicles.)

Meanwhile the highways in many cities have been deliberately allowed to deteriorate to try to push people onto mass transit systems. (Yes, they even admitted it publicly in at least one place: The SF Bay area, when LA got their freeways back up in months after a big quake while SF was still twiddling their thumbs years after their own.)

A (classic) SUV has a suspension designed for off-road and can handle a potholed freeway just fine, when a compact car would be in the shop for a realignment (at a minimum) after hitting one of these irregularities, and has a hard time maintaining speed and lane position if the road is bad.

(Of course once the practical thinkers among the city people - often successful types that are trend-setters - started using them, it became a status symbol and a fad. These days lots of city people use them who don't "need" them - but prefer them and vote with their dollars.)

But now there's a big push by the elitists self-proclaimed social engineers to get