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Solar Powered Car Attempts to Break Record
Snowdon writes "Jaycar Sunswift III today started on its 4000km journey across the Australian outback, in an attempt to beat the 8.5 day record from Perth to Sydney. The team expects to complete the journey in 6 days, depending on the weather. It is a seriously innovative machine, with the aerodynamic design iteratively optimised on 80 CS lab computers over three months, custom-built carbon-fibre wheels, chassis, suspension and steering components, and custom-built power electronics and telemetry/control systems (components of which presently use Linux, but will soon run Iguana/Wombat). It is the result of several years' work by both undergraduate and postgraduate students at UNSW. Keep track of the team's progress by visiting www.sunswift.com."
Do you think it would survive a collision with a kangaroo? I hear they can be a problem in the outback.
The article title had me excited for a second - as a (ex-)member of the University of Waterloo's Midnight Sun Solar Race Car Team that broke the world record for the longest distance traveled on a solar car, I thought they were trying to erase us from the record books. I guess the distance record will be safe for next little while longer. :)
I wish you guys the best in your journey ahead! UNSW, for those that don't know, has one of the most advanced photovoltaic research labs in the world and probably still holds all the records for getting the highest efficiency out of Si-cells.
Seems to be slashdotted to me, and only 2 comments already.
God spoke to me.
One problem with this course is that its one-way, not symetrical. If a team wants to cheat, what they do is calculate the averate prevailing winds, and form their vehicles shape to get a boost from this. Not to imply this team is doing that, but because its possible and difficult to detect, a more symetrical course would be desirable.
Once again we are plagued with stories originating from this so called "Western Australia". As an Australian I am probably most aware of the myth of Western Australia, for those of you not in the know I'll lay it out for you. Have you ever been to Western Australia? No you haven't, have you ever met anyone who is from Western Australia? No, I didn't think so. Seriously ask around your office, no one has been there. Sure you hear about it in the news (such as the article) but finding good hard evidence of its existence just isn't possible. Why you ask? Because Western Australia doesn't exist. Think about it. The supposed state is massive, too large to practically be governed by one single state government. Furthermore it is conveniently placed about as far away as possible from any other people, people who could verify its existence. As far as I can tell the whole myth of WA started as an inside joke between cartographers. Soon many other professionals, publishers, politicians, journalists, photographers etc. took notice and they all created their own versions of the joke. Together they created a vast tapestry of "evidence" of its existence and culture. Over the years this myth grew and the various versions merged together. Today many people just assume the state exists. A good repository of false evidence can be found here. Unfortunately some people are so convinced of this preposterous notion they relentlessly revert my many edits to the site. Think about it people! A black swan? That doesn't make any sense at all, swans are white not black. OPEN YOUR EYES SHEEPLE!!
Assuming you stick to the sealed roads there is no issue. Highways like the Great Eastern Highway, the Eyre Highway and the Barrier Highway are trafficable to anything that can handle normal sealed city roads.
Just make sure you have enough fuel for the trip, its a long way between gas stations out in the bush (although with these guys getting energy from the sun, that wont be an issue for them)
80 Australian CS lab computers - What's that in US computers?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
UNSW is a true veteran of the solar car racing world. I wish them all the best of luck in their treck across the outback, and hope they bring lots of spare tires!
Let me take this opportunity to plug the premire solar car race, coming up this October, for its 20th anniversary, the World Solar Challenge. I hope to be there, and I'm sure UNSW will join the rest of the field. Everyone come watch if you can, or at least follow along online.
http://www.wsc.org.au/2007/
As a member of a college-level solar car team, I'm curious as to what the solar cells that it uses are. It's nothing special that just about everything on the car is custom built; that's a norm for SC teams. There are two divisions in the World Solar Challenge. One division, the more publicized, is restricted to "publicly available" (though not necessarily cheap) solar cells. There are various other limitations in this category as well. The other, which I know even less about, but allows any solar cells to be used.
A common reference that my team gives the public is that our car runs on the power of a hair dryer. Does this car attain more or less power.
I'd guess this project doesn't have any restrictions. I just wonder, that's all.
Off a stoplight my Dodge Neon would smoke this greenie weenie POS like it was standing still.
Mopar or No Car!
Right smack in the middle of the outback is the "city" of Alice Springs. There is a "river" going through it. They say that if you saw water in the river more than twice you're a local.
They have an annual boat race down the river. The boats don't have bottoms, and the team members grab the boat with their hands and run Flintstones-style.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
In previous years, the cars would have support crews who would head out ahead of the solar car and place plywood over the grid. Then, when the car had passed, pick up the plywood, overtake the solar car, and be in place for the next grid. Kind of defeats the purpose somewhat!
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The highways in the outback are among the best roads around. They miss out on the two things that make roads break: Traffic, because they are not heavily used (~A few hundered vehicles a day), and weather, as it almost never rains. So, once built, a road needs little maintanence. The Ideal place for a solar challenge!
Dirt roads are a different matter. Next time I head west of the divide I'll take a new picture for wikipedia's "Corrugated roads" article that actually has some corrugations. 4 to 6 inches deep, and up to half a meter long on high speed roads. People head out at 100Km/h on them in domestic 4WD vehicles, and the coil springs break within the first few days.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Apologies. We've moved it to a much more appropriate server and updated the DNS. It should filter through to you all soon.
We weren't able to use the machines in the lab's opening hours. Mostly because the simulations required large amounts of RAM. We wrote up a submission system which started the machines up each night, ran the simulation until the labs opened, and shut the simulations down again. This would happen each night until the job was done and the results were added to the pile. Each job was run on 8 machines, so we were able to do 10 in parallel. That's 10 slightly different designs which were tested in parallel. Each job would take a few nights to complete. (For those interested, we were running a 15 million element model in Fluent). In total we would have tested several hundred permutations. The main things we were looking for were the car's ride-height, the length and position of the spats/wheels, the canopy shape/length, and the shape of the nose. We needed to run multiple simulations to see how the car would handle in cross winds, etc. You can see a pretty picture of the results in the Gallery page on sunswift.com.
Are there any Open projects going strong for adapting a street car to have some added electrical drive + regen braking, I figure my 12 mile commute could be made considerably cheaper. I have always wondered why we [geeks] can't come up with a modification to add embedded motors on the free wheels of a two wheel drive - add some firmware and we're looking at bolt on 4 wheel drive + greatly improved torque at the wheels, something the performance modders can get excited about.
induction charging, or plug in at the garage at home, a small solar panel to top off at work before the schlep home...
Not from scratch like these guys...
http://www.theoscarproject.org/
yeah, I know I could google it...
.sigless since 2003
As a University of Toronto Engineer, I was a member of the UofT Blue Sky Solar Racing Team in 2003 and 2004. In that time, I had a lot of fun and met many great people, one of whom was Andrew Frow, who lost his life in a solar car accident in August of 2004. He was a great leader with a vision, who always kept the big picture in mind. He made every member of the team feel like they were doing something useful, even us F!rosh that didn't know anything about Engineering yet.
Aikon-