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« August 2007 | Main | October 2007 »
Members of UMR's World Speed Challenge Team, an off-shoot of UMR's championship Human-Powered Vehicle Team, are leaving for Nevada today on a quest to break the collegiate land speed record. Videographer Tom Shipley is following them on a quest to make the best documentary since Roger and Me. Here's some early video, some of which will eventually find its way into Shipley's finished masterpiece:
UMR's 2007 entry in the Solar Decathlon is on the road. Monday the team, with help from wall manufacturer Thermocore of Missouri and a large crane, removed the house's roof and upper floors, and began to box in the house for travel. When heavy rains swept over the partially roofless house students successfully contained the leaks with plastic sheeting, buckets, and even inverted hard hats to protect the house interior. Wednesday the students rigged the first of two modules to be crane-lifted onto flatbed trucks, with Luke Sudkamp spacing steel beams to properly support the nearly 9-ton house.
Lifting the house simply involved slowly swinging the 32' section counter-clockwise around the crane and setting it on a flatbed trailer. After loading various deck sections and a small electric car, the house was shrink-wrapped, tarped and chained down and sent on its way. Today the remaining module will get the same treatment, and then the team will load up the tools and equipment necessary to reverse the process.
It's crunch time for UMR's 2007 Solar House. With the house scheduled to move on to the National Mall in Washington DC in less than two weeks the sun-powered structure has switched from the construction phase to the DE-construction phase. Right after applying the house's (almost) finishing touches students immediately began to prepare to load it onto trucks for the nearly 1,000-mile trip to the nation's Capitol. Kinda like a very large, very slow, solar car race. In this photo Project Manager Bill Eggert helps Jacob Colbert hang the kitchen cabinets which will remain in place throughout the trip.
Starting Monday the team will lift off the roof sections and all upper walls before separating the two house sections for transport. Two days later a crane will lift the modules from the foundation and onto trucks for the trip. At 12:01 a.m. October 3rd twenty structures will descend onto the Mall in a wild race to rebuild the houses as part of the Solar Decathlon.
This is not only necessary to join the bustling solar village on the Mall (over 100,000 visitors expected), but is a dress rehearsal for bringing the home back to UMR's Solar Village. For THAT de-construction phase the team must remove the house from the Mall in a staggering 52 hours! With luck the house will be all put back together and ready to hang out the "For Rent" sign in time for the spring semester.
Any engineer worth his or her slide rule knows that you design, build, and TEST. Over and over again.
UMR's second round of longer-distance testing of StreaMiner, again hosted by Gateway International Raceway, proved successful Monday night. After a brief run to check out pavement conditions Andrew and Craig bolted the top of the fairing on sealing Jerrod inside, and giving several UMR alums a preview of what StreaMiner will actually look like.
With a little help truing the front wheel from future UMR/Missouri S&T student Caleb Strackeljahn (whose alumni parents Sam and Sylvia showed up to cheer the team), the team ran a few laps before making adjustments, and headed back onto the oval until darkness brought testing to a halt.
Still swathed it its special plastic and masonite scratch protection (in the event of a wreck), Jerrod kept working out the bugs at higher and higher speeds. Starting out in the high 20's, he managed to push the bike to nearly 40 mph despite having all that drag duct-taped on the bike and not being able to build speed on the banked turns. How do we know how fast he went? The Rolla Police Department was kind enough to loan us a radar gun! Way cool!
Thank you, Toyota, for moving us forward. After a one-year hiatus for the biannual North American Solar Challenge, the event is back! Toyota has stepped up to the plate as the primary sponsor for the world's biggest solar car race. Two-time national champion UMR is one of the key players in international solar car racing and has started production on its next solar car, tentatively named Solar Miner VI, with a public role-out expected at the 100th St Pat's celebration in March.
Toyota's sponsorship of the solar car race shows their committment to alternative energy sources, and is consistent with the company's role as the world's largest manufacturer of hybrid vehicles. Toyota is also the title sponsor for the ninth consecutive year of National Public Lands Day, designed to preserve America's public lands.
Thank you, Toyota, for ALL of this great support!
What floats your boat? How ‘bout a desert-style racing vehicle in a lake? Dow Chemical’s generous donation of blue foam sheets becomes the building blocks of nearly every team project.
The concrete canoe builders use the water jet lab to cut out dozens of foam panels (above) that make up the mold against which the concrete is formed. Solar car uses the lightweight material to form the body on which the solar cells are mounted, the Advanced Aero Vehicle Group covers thin foam sections with Kevlar to form the plane’s ribs, the Formula SAE, Human Powered Vehicle, and Land Speed Challenge racing teams all use the rigid foam to mold their body panels, and the Baja team even used Dow’s product to build its highly successful flotation chambers for its amphibious off-road (get it?) race car. Thanks, Dow Chemical!!
The UMR Solar House Team's participation in the 2002 and 2005 Solar Decathlons inspired Cheryl Marcum and her husband, Mitchell Ross, to move from Alexandria, Va., to the farm where Cheryl grew up near Stockton, Mo. -- where they now live in their very own solar house. Cheryl recently sent us a nice email:
I know the university invested considerable resources in designing, building and transporting their houses to the Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C., and we thought the school would like to know that investment stimulated at least two people to make a huge life decision to build an energy efficient home -- in Southwest Missouri, no less.
Now, less than a few years after being impressed by the UMR entries in D.C., the Marcums' new house is on the American Solar Energy Society's National Solar Tour. Cheryl and her husband both attended Missouri State, but they wanted us to know that the efforts of the UMR Solar House Team have had a profound impact on their lives.
StreaMiner is built for high-speed stability and performance, just like a jet fighter. But just like a jet fighter, it can have problems getting started and off the ground, so to speak.
Solution? How about outriggers? Nah, too much drag. How about running alongside? Nope, can’t keep up. What about Craig on wheels? Now there’s a solution! Craig George holds up the fairing to keep Jerrod from falling over at low speed, but Craig can’t push or he’ll fall over, too. Why not use Ben Kettler for motive power?
So here’s the scenario. High-powered racer Jerrod, held up by composite specialist/rollerblade phenom Craig George, and propelled by fellow Human Powered Vehicle racer Ben Kettler. It may not be pretty (sorry, guys!), but it gets the job done, and that is what the team is all about.
Oh yeah, and all that stuff duct-taped to the side of the fairing? It isn’t camouflage to keep the bodywork a secret (think automotive spy photos in Popular Mechanics magazine). It is just to keep the shell from getting scratched up in the event of a wreck. They will unveil a cool new logo and paint scheme in a week or so.
Composite expert Craig George needed to build a windshield that matched the bullet-like shape of "StreaMiner", UMR's Land Speed Challenge vehicle. Lacking an expensive autoclave to heat and bend the clear acrylic sheets into the required curves, Craig designed and built his own forming machine around three aluminum pancake griddles.
Simply mounting the sheets an inch below the inverted heaters softened the material enough that it could be pressed and formed against a vacuum mold.
And the source for the suction power? A shop vac, of course!