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2008 North American Solar Challenge
Wednesday July 23rd, 2008
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Today at the North American Solar Challenge awards luncheon, the team from Western Michigan University was awarded the Sportsmanship Award.
The NASC leadership cited the many difficulties the team had experienced in their attempt to qualify the solar car. Then after having completed all the dynamic testing and finally getting on the track, the array blew off the car and put an end to the qualifying attempt. The award was presented to the team for having volunteered to help any other teams during the cross-country event and to assist the officials at stage stops. The presentation of the award received the loudest and longest applause of all other presentations. The team will be starting for home and will be honored at a luncheon on August 1 in the Plastics Lab of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Starting at 11:00 a.m.
July 11th, 2008
It looks as though the roller coaster ride has finally come to an end. After weeks of work back in the plastics lab and an intense week at scrutineering, the car crashed when the array detached and flipped once in the air and then landed on the back right corner and settled cells up on the track. Nick (the driver) was fine and handled the situation perfectly, but was unable to complete the minimum number of laps needed to qualify. Here are the events of the day.
We started early in the morning when we arrived at the track to finish the dynamic testing. We were re-inspected for the turning test (the car must perform a 180 in a 16m wide lane) and passed with flying colors. Then we proceeded to the braking test. Alex drove down the track a little ways and spun the car around and began accelerating towards the wetted pavement. On the first attempt, he wasn't able to get the car up to speed and the test didn't count. On the second attempt, we climbed up to 26 mph, approached the brake zone and when the flag dropped, Alex slammed on the brakes. The car came screeching to a stop but took a few tenths of a second to long. After another two attempts we stopped in 2.8 seconds after coming into the brake zone at 29 mph. Finally we were qualified for the track.
The next step for us was to go back to scrutineering and turn our yellows into greens. Every station we stopped at turned us from yellow to green and we finished up with BPS (the battery protection system) at 1pm. We hurried back to the trailer and prepped the car for the rally. As we were preparing to leave the pits and enter the track, the BPS tripped for no reason. After some investigation we determined that the radios we were using to communicate with the driver were interfering with the BPS so we replaced the radio with the 2005 walkie-talkies and took off on the track. Alex completed 19 laps before switching out with Nick. The car handled fantastically and it is a real shame that it won't be an official part of the cross country race.
(Click Image for Larger Size) |
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Solar array as good as new! |
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