SEVT update

Hey everyone, the blog has been a bit lacking as of late, so we wanted to update you as to whats going on in the SEVT world for the last couple months since the end of the race.

After a couple well deserved weeks of rest, and a new set of officers leading the team, we got right back to business. First off, I wanted to confirm that MIT will be attending the American Solar Challenge this summer!! We are really excited to get back to raycing, especially with Chopper del Sol. Even with our solid finish at WSC, we think we can do better. This is especially exciting, since its the first time in several years that SEVT is back on a yearly race schedule (WSC and ASC on alternate years) as opposed to our typical two-year race cycle. Also, we haven't been to ASC for several years (since 2005), so it'll be good to be racing on our home turf against our fellow universities.

The team is really excited, and with a fantastic new group of freshmen (no seriously, these guys are awesome) joining our ranks, we're optimistic about our chances at ASC.

Since the end of WSC, we've been working hard to modify our vehicle for ASC. Although most of Chopper can remain unchanged, a few things do need to be addressed. Over IAP (Independent Activities Period - a month off in January to do anything, we choose to do solar car) we have been working nonstop. Our major achievement was doing a full layup of the lower body, which needed to be redone after our mediocre job last summer following our accident. It also gave us the opportunity to improve our manufacturing techniques and make an even higher quality composite structure. We are currently working on the body finish, prepping it for painting. We're also redoing our fairings, making them wider so we can use wide Michelin tires, should we choose to run on them at the race.

Below are some pics of the layup. Enjoy!

WSC 2011 Final Results

The final results from WSC went up -- the provisional results were contested, and WSC officials found a few accounting errors. We moved up one place to 15th, with the same number of solar kilometers (2222).

Full results here.

Meant to be Bent: a new series on creative interpretation of rules by Adam Delton

As many of you may have ascertained from the blog posts of recent weeks, WSC 2011 was a particularly... challenging World Solar Challenge for the MIT team.  Along the road to Adelaide we had some times where team morale was not particularly high, and it was often during these times that I made it my role to lighten the mood a bit with some completely serious speculation on methods designed to circumvent certain WSC regulations.  By popular request, I am now embarking on a mission to fully explore these interesting and complex ideas and share them with you.  As a disclaimer, all of what I detail in "Meant to be Bent" is completely serious.  The concepts that follow have been explained to WSC officials in a face-to-face setting, and each one has failed to be disallowed under the current set of rules.  That said, I cannot guarantee their compliance with 2013 rules.  So now, for Meant to be Bent, Episode I:




MEANT TO BE BENT


Swarm of Insolation Disrupting High Altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (aka SIDHAUAV)

- the concept is that the team will invest in repurposing discarded military drones to automatically track the position of other solar teams' vehicles during the race day from a high altitude, and maintaining a position directly between the sun of our solar system and that team's array of solar cells

-the effect is simulated here on the UC Berkeley, Team CalSol's 2011 vehicle, "Impulse"

before:

after:

(head to calsol.berkeley.edu to check out Impulse and our good friends at CalSol)

- by remaining high enough in the air, the drone can perform its task relatively undetected, by resembling a (strangely persistent) soaring bird

- modifications to the wings may need to be made to increase the shadow size of the craft

- with a fleet of these artificially creating less-than-ideal sun conditions for non-MIT vehicles, we will secure ourselves a nice edge over the competition

Bottom Line:
Cost: $40 million per drone (possible price break for order of 30+)
Time: full-time project for several aerospace engineers, electrical engineers, and computer science seniors / grad students
Legality: undetectable
Awesome-Factor: 7.8/10

Further Exploration:
- training actual birds to block insolation
- mirror/lens/fiber optic system on drones to redirect intercepted sunlight to MIT array for further advantage

More Race Photos

A couple more race photos! Photo credit: Simon Calcutt (our awesome British Electrical Engineer).  Simon had worked with the team when he had been at MIT as an exchange student from Cambridge University. It was wonderful to have him join us in Australia this year.

The team at the finish line: Victoria Square in Adelaide.

Chopper in the Australian outback. 

Epic sunset picture.

Chopper + Trailer under the night sky.

Driving through the rain. Rain-X and Silicone sealant go a long way.

Kelly cruising along.

Team paparazzi taking pictures of our lead car followed by the solar car and chase. 

Day 7 - River Deep, Mountain High

At the end of Day 6, we laid out our ole' trusty blue tarp at a campground in Glendambo and slept there*. We woke up to a sky full of clouds and misery.

Our scout car drove south, seeking sunnier skies. The rest of the team, with our trailered car, followed scout forward until we found a nice, flat spot with decent sun. After charging our pack from the array, we trailered the car back a couple hundred kilometers and proceeded to drive Chopper forward until we hit Port Augusta. Along the way, we encountered plenty of rolling hills, cattle grates, gusts of wind, and fast road trains.

Waiting for the clouds to break during our morning charge:

Solarcars were not allowed to drive south of Port Augusta after a certain time, so we trailered Chopper and took our convoy south to Adelaide.

We dropped out bags off at Quest in Adelaide and devoured a Lebanese meal. As you may know, Adelaide means partytime!, so we proceeded to meet up with other teams and celebrate the end of the race.

On Sunday, we drove up to the WSC finish line in Victoria Square. Rachel, Andy, and Annette then dashed off to the airport to catch their flights home. The rest of the team cleaned out our support vehicles, packed our supplies, and got ready to ship the trailer home.

That night, we attended the awards ceremony and got to congratulate the seven teams that finished the race without trailering. I'd like to give kudos to the UMichigan team not only for performing well, but also for embodying the spirit of the race and giving us help when we needed it. Thanks, UM, for lending us battery modules. You da best.

The race results were released that night, and we saw that we finished 16th out of the 37 (or 35?) competing teams.

The next morning, we flew out of Adelaide and encountered various mishaps at the Sydney airport and at LAX. We are now safely in Cambridge :D

We are humbled by the turn of events that happened in WSC 2011: hellish circumstances, a gracious donation, broken dreams, and new hope. Here's a big THANK YOU to everyone who contributed time, energy, money, materials, and well wishes to the team.

WSC 2011

MIT SEVT

(Both photos by Chris Pentacoff. Thanks dude.)
*At the end of Day 6 we drove our convoy north of Glendambo, desperate to find sun for an evening charge.  While passing a non-MIT vehicle, our truck hit an emu which later died. Nameless Emu, we apologize deeply...

Quick race update, more to come

On the last day we woke up to grey skies with a few patches of sun in the distance. We tried to trailer to an area with more sun, but ended up underestimating how much the clouds would clear up and had to trailer back up the highway a bit to add more solar miles to our trip. In the end, we completed 2222 km on solar power (total coincidence for the number of km) and ended up in 16th place based on provisional results. After Port Augusta, we packed the car up again to get to Adelaide for the night and a much deserved night off. 

On Sunday morning, the WSC officials kindly let us parade to the finish line out of finishing order so that I could cross the finish line with the team and still make my flight back to the states at 10:50am. A few excited team members made the traditional jump into the fountain and we took our car through the final inspection to show we had complied with race regulations. 

Everyone flew home on Monday to get back to classes and start making up work we missed for the race. Thank you to all the MIT professors who have made coming to WSC possible for the SEVT in the middle of the semester.

We'll post a bunch more pictures of the race soon. Thanks to everyone who has been following our blog over the race. Our total number of page views has more than doubled in the past month. It's very exciting to have some many people checking in on our progress.

Day 6 - Ain't no sunshine

After an interesting night spent huddled up in tents, cars, and the trailer to shield ourselves from the downpours, we woke up to a miserable sight: heavy clouds and a reading of 0.166 Amps on the test solar cell on roof of our chase car. Needless to say we were not getting a morning charge, much less making the next checkpoint before closing.

So after some reluctance, we started off the morning with the car in the trailer - our first time since we had started the race some 1901 kilometres prior. We were all a bit disappointed to have to pack Chopper up inside, but pretty proud of how far we had gotten considering we had run the entire race on 16kg of lithium-ion cells (when rules allow 21kg) [Why? see this blog post] as well as faced some other significant hurdles.

Chopper del Sol underneath an overcast sky.

We did manage to get a brief charge in to drive further, increasing our solar kilometers travelled. Couple historical landmarks passed include Australia's Dog Fence which, at 7000km, is the longest fence in the world. It keeps the wild dogs (dingos) out of sheep country in Southern Australia. With all that hype we were expecting something more dramatic, but turns out it was just a cattle grid and some barbed wire. We also passed a lot of opal mines along the way.

The weather remained dreadful all afternoon. We kept driving along, watching the Amp-hours consumed slowly increase on our battery pack. To show how rotten our luck has been, here a screen shot of the satellite imagery of the mass of clouds sitting mostly immobile above the Stuart Highway for today:

The clouds sitting over the Stuart Highway.

We're camped out in Glendambo, some 600km north of the race finish, waiting for some sun tomorrow to hopefully power us through the finish to Adelaide. The forecast is looking good and we saw a couple stars tonight.