A team of engineers from the University of Michigan is currently finishing the Generation, their latest solar car. U of M is a regular favorite to win the biggest solar car competitions: the North American Solar Challenge (from Tulsa, OK to Naperville, IL) and the World Solar Challenge (from Darwin, Australia, to Adelaide).
The Generation is the team's entry into the 2013 World Solar Challenge, which begins this October, and the competition in 2013 has more strict requirements than in years past. The goal of the new regs is to get the slew of entrants to create cars that resemble something – anything – that could finds its way onto a showroom floor. Among the criteria, the cars must have four wheels (last year they could have three), a full field-of-vision for the driver, and a seat that’s higher than the driver’s feet.
Seems simple enough. Not quite.
The team has finalized the design and finished the molds. Now, they’re working on the carbon fiber body and will be constructing until early June, when they plan to have the Generation completed. Until then, schematics and photos remain classified so they won’t tip off the competition.
Eric Hausman, team project manager and a sophomore in industrial and operations engineering, said, “By far the biggest goal for Generation would be aerodynamics – reducing the aerodynamic drag.” With the new four-wheel regulations and the wide field-of-vision, creating a solar machined that will cut through the air efficiently will be difficult. “The driver will need to sit closer to the front of the car, so it’s harder to fit the driver into the airflow of the vehicle,” Hausman said.
In a three-wheeled vehicle, the driver can sit just ahead of the single rear wheel, which lets the cockpit integrate with the car’s tapered sides. Having four wheels makes drag a much bigger obstacle. “It’s pretty much like having a brick hanging down in the middle of the car,” Hausman said. “It’s really hard to make a brick aerodynamic."
The U of M team has some big-name help coming in from the likes of Ford, GM, and Exa Corporation, a firm that produces software for driving simulators that help developers find optimal aerodynamics. U of M worked with Exa on their 2012 car and the software helped achieve a 30 percent loss in drag. “For most cars, [Exa has] to worry about styling, but all we care about is speed,” Hausman said. And distance.
