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American Solar Challenge Racers Head For Canada
coondoggie writes "Solar race cars this week began their nine-day,
2,400 mile chase from Dallas to Calgary, Alberta using only the sun for fuel. The 24 teams in the American Solar Challenge race are mainly US college teams including entries from MIT, Ohio State and Northwestern. The University of Michigan's Continuum car is the defending champ, having won the Challenge in Australia last year. The University of Michigan has won four out of the eight North American Solar Challenges it has entered with its team of more than 100 engineering students, who have vowed to defend their title this year."
Here are some photos I shot of the teams preparing their cars the day before the rally started in Plano, Texas.
North American Solar Challenge 2008 prep day photos
Michigan won the 2005 American Solar Challenge race by about ten minutes over Minnesota.
My team won the 2005 American Solar Challenge for the stock class, edging out Berkeley by 26 minutes.
In 2001 the Nuna of the Delft University of Technology from the Netherlands, participating for the first time, was the fastest.
In 2003 the Nuna 2, the successor to the winner of 2001 won again, with an average speed of 97 km/h (60 mph).
In 2005 the Nuna team scored a hat-trick with their third victory in a row; their Nuna 3 won with a record average speed of 102.75 km/h (63.85 mph). Aurora finished in second place followed by the University of Michigan in third.
In 2007 the Dutch Nuon Solar team scored their fourth successive victory with Nuna4 in the challenge class averaging 90.07 km/h (55.97 mph) under the new rules, while the Ashiya team with their car Tiga won the race in the adventure class under the old rules with an average speed of 93.53 km/h (58.12 mph).
But it makes sense, with the average Dutch weather our solar tech has to be really good!
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
As long as the stay away from Quebec, this might work out nicely. If they do, they risk being stalled in the middle of nowhere due to the lack of sun or simply wreck their fragile cars on our beautiful roads.
In June, we had 23 days of rain here. I could hardly power my LED garden lamps more than 15 minutes after sun set.
Environment Canada has forecast a dry and warm summer. Considering that for the month of June, and I quote the EC experts, "we've never seen that much rain recorded history", and that the dry and warm summer trend should continue on, I think it safe to assume we'll have a quite a (boat) ride with the weather this summer.
Unless they build little dams on the car roofs and install water turbines, these will have a hard time here. (understand, a slow - or stopped - time).
Moose versus Solar Car would not harm the moose, but it would be unlikely the car would roll again. What sort of technology is being employed for the very serious issue of possible Moose Damage inflicted onto a solar car during a race?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Calgary is one of the sunniest cities in North America in terms of amount of sunshine per year. Southern Alberta is, in large part, a semi-arid region with very low humidity, so the Sun really packs a wallop here due to very low atmospheric extinction. At this time of year the days are also longer the further North you go. Those cars will probably make better time once they cross into Canada than they will in most parts of the U.S..
However, Alberta isn't really a solar energy hot-spot. Wind power is where it's at. Alberta produces more wind power than any other province in Canada. Whichever racers have the foresight to pack a sail will probably make the best time on the last leg of their journey.
those truck drivers drive like hell on US-75 so be careful!!! stay in the right-hand lane whenever possible and the truckers will naturally pass in the left lane (the hammer lane)
I live 60 miles from McAlester i may just drive to BigMac just to wave from the side of the road, i wish you all lots of good luck...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
This is essentially the existing rule in the North American Solar Challenge (and I'm pretty sure in the other solar challenges, like the upcoming South African Solar Challenge and the 2009 World Solar Challenge), and the operating principle behind every competing solar car. No one powers their car directly from the solar array--they all use rechargable batteries and use the solar array to charge those batteries. They're fast, too--the current University of Michigan solar car has been tested at more than 80 mph on the racetrack, and the past two World Solar Challenge-winning cars from the Dutch Nuon team had comparable top speeds.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Actually in Canada, in the summer, there is more sunshine than U.S. (the days are longer than the nights). Today, there was 16 hours of sunshine in Calgary. In Dallas, there were 14 hours, 4 minutes.
Close, it charges in 3.5hrs and lasts around 4.5. You might have been thinking of an older version.
Thanks Hal, that's about right (though to be fair, Michigan probably has more logistical support than Nuon these days, although Nuon still had the advantage of a huge cash sponsorship early in the project that allowed them to snap up the world's best solar cells before Michigan had any cash for a down payment - the teams would have likely been well matched without Michigan's accident).
Regarding the crash, Stanford was indeed ruled not legally culpable - but whether they were at *fault* or not, their support cars' panic brake in congested traffic certainly helped *cause* the accident. I think it was an unfortunate accident and Stanford did nothing malicious, but legal fault and cause are two different things - and the distinction is understandably blurry for someone who has to look at two years of their work smashed up on the side of the road. Driving in city traffic(solar races are on open roads) is a dangerous balance for solar car teams - drive close to your lead and chase cars, and you're protected from other drivers but you might collide with your own vehicles if they are forced to stop fast. But you can't really leave a truly "safe" stopping distance, because you end up with aggressive drivers cutting between your lead car and your solar car, an extremely dangerous situation. Of course this happens to everyday drivers as well - try maintaining the recommended safe interval between you and the car in front of you in rush hour traffic, and think about how often you avoiding an accident relies on the person in front of you being conscious enough to not slam on their brakes.
Regarding solar car brakes, Michigan does indeed use heavy duty downhill mountain bike disk brakes (which many if not most teams use). Why don't we use something more powerful? Because the brakes we have are plenty strong enough to immediately lock the wheels at speed - that is, our brakes supply more stopping power than our tires (low rolling resistance tires that are the same or equivalent to what every team uses) can apply to the road, so anything more powerful is just dead weight (which would ironically make us stop slower).
At any rate, any fault for the accident probably lies with the race officials, who violated their own safety rules by allowing the Stanford solar car to start the race without its support vehicles due to a huge snafu in the support vehicle staging area. This is a hugely dangerous situation, and there is supposed to be a system in place to prevent and correct this, but the rules were not followed. Had they been, Stanford wouldn't have had to come to a screeching near halt in morning traffic directly in front of the Michigan caravan while they were trying to rendezvous with their solar car.
Michigan's Continuum (despite its bad luck streak) is one of the safest solar cars in the competition, and rolled to the start line in Australia with literally thousands of miles of open road testing. Anyone who thinks otherwise might want to ask WSC second place finisher Umicore, who had a wickedly fast car but a wobbly steering system that barely kept them on the road. Or Twente, who also had a great car but suffered continual suspension failures. Or Stanford, who actually flipped their car a day or two after the Michigan incident (I think that one was due to a blown tire which led to a road departure followed by a suspension collapse). Or Aurora, whose 2005 car burned to a crisp due to a battery fire. Of course, the worst offender, although they've thankfully not had an accident, may well be 4 time WSC winner Nuon, who in 2005 had a driver's canopy so tiny that their driver had only a vestigial roll bar and could not even wear a helmet. Had they suffered Stanford's crash (which the Stanford driver walked away from, thank God), their driver would be dead. That, my friends, is sacrificing safety for speed.
As for Michigan's sportsmanship, apparently innovation gets called "gaming the race framework". Continuum had a solar concentration system on their car was one of only two successful implementations of s