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."

Clear sky all the way across!

[miratrix]

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 [uwaterloo.ca] that broke the world record for the longest distance traveled on a solar car [guinnessworldrecords.com], 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.

Re:No Roo bars?

[mjwx]

The biggest problems with hitting roo's up north (of Australia) is at night when the kangaroo gets stunned by the headlights. Something tells me this wont be an issue on a solar powered car.

FYI Roo's do bound out onto the road in daylight but an experienced driver can stop in time (by slowing down when they see roo's on the side of the road).

Re:omg that's hard

[jonwil]

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)

Dealing with the cattle grids

[robbak]

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!

Outback highways are actually very good.

[robbak]

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.

Re:Too bad their webserver isn't run on 80 compute

[snowdon]

Apologies. We've moved it to a much more appropriate server and updated the DNS. It should filter through to you all soon.

Re:Hogging 80 *lab* machines?

[snowdon]

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.

Re:What about the solar cells?

[snowdon]

There are 1034 cut down Sunpower A300 cells in the array. (They're cut to take off the corners and allow us to get 5% more active area into our 12m^2 - we ended up with 11.5m^2 active area). They're encapsulated by Gochermann Solar Techonology in Germany (for reference: I can't speak highly enough of these things. Having built several of our arrays, including the vacuum-formed curved panels for Sunswift 2, I can assure everyone that this is easily the best experience I've ever had with solar cells. Everything just works the way its supposed to).

Re:No Roo bars?

[GoulDuck]

From their homepage FAQ:

Q: How fast does it go?
A: UNSW Sunswift III has been driven at up to 120km/h, however it could probably go faster than this. As the speed increases the power required increases dramatically (it is a cubic function), so in solar car racing average speed is of much greater interest! In good conditions (over a long distance) we can expect a cruising speed of 90km/h or more.

Our previous solar car, UNSW Sunswift II, reached a maximum speed of 140km/h.

From Wikipedia about Kangaroos:

The comfortable hopping speed for Red Kangaroos is about 20-25 km/h (13-16 mph), but speeds of up to 70 km/h (43 mph) can be attained, over short distances.

My guess is that you could easily catch up with a kangaroo...

In Memoriam

[AikonMGB]

As a University of Toronto Engineer, I was a member of the UofT Blue Sky Solar Racing Team [utoronto.ca] in 2003 and 2004. In that time, I had a lot of fun and met many great people, one of whom was Andrew Frow [utoronto.ca], 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-

Re:No Roo bars?

[Anthony]

After hitting 5 of them, I have to call myself experienced. When they jump out from bushes on the side of the road, you don't always get to see them in time. My first collision caused the most car damage. Too dark to see if the roo survived. Last one was in my Jazz and both the Honda Jazz and the roo were shaken but not injured. I had roo bars on my Toyota Tarago and that was my only confirmed kill. Instant roo death at 80km/hr braking to impact at about 60km/hr.

BTW, there is no need to travel to the outback to see kangaroos. All of these incidents have occurred over the last 20 or so years in Canberra.