Awesome Australian Adventure A mechanical solution to an electrical problem.

Defense Against Rogue Australian Ecosystem

by matt

We have made great progress since we arrived in Darwin almost three days ago. We arrived, and were immediately attacked by the "tropical" ecosystem. It alternatively poured, then was sunny, then poured again as we drove through Adelaide River. This warning failed to scare us until DC Posch's stomach was ripped apart by food poisoning from the sandwiches he ate at the "rogue" bucking bull burger in Katherine. At this point, the right side of the Solar Car Van received some chunky brown decoration to match the yellow decoration from melted Canola spread.

At this point, we were legitimately scared. Upon arriving at the racetrack, DC started vomiting blood, so we took him to the hospital. Luckily, DC was able to game the system, just like he gamed the catalog computers at the City Library in Melbourne and turned them into a coding machines.  He talked a nurse and got free medical advice, then took the next day to recover.

Next was Marvin!.  We suspected that we had imported dangerous American species into the country when Sasha found a black widow in the undercarriage of our solar car van.  Marvin! was bitten by a spider on our epic 35-hour drive from Cooper Pedy to Darwin.  His foot swelled up, but he ignored it.  To be fair, he had not eaten breakfast.  At scrutineering, the judges decided that the problem with our car was that Marvin! had a swollen ankle.  We agreed emphatically, and sent him to the hospital.  Although our safety officer Lucie had treated him with antihistamines and an elastic bandage the night before, the doctors were able to one-up her and gave Marvin! antibiotics and a better elastic bandage.  Once again, we were able to defeat the inhospitable "tropical" ecosystem of Darwin with science.  To be fair, Marvin! had eaten all of the black widow's babies.

Speaking of babies and scrutineering, we passed scrutineering, with the exception of our American CB radios and legacy "skater" helmet.  Once again, we learned that Australia likes helmets (did you know that it is illegal to ride a bicycle in this country if you don't have a piece of foam on your head?).  Besides this we were told that our two massively strong steel rollbars were okay, but technically there should only be one and it should be constructed of a brittle, difficult to model material such as crabon fibre.  The judges were almost as impressed with our door as they were with the hydraulic action of the banana slug car.  However, our car paled in comparison to Bochum's newest car, the BoCruiser, which resembles a normal car more than any other solar car ever and has elaborate crabon fibre work including a beautiful crabon fibre throne.

Bocruiser at Scrutineering: Note the Crabon Fibre Throne.

Also note that the Bottom Shell Slopes upwards and is hollow in the back.

Speaking of crabon fibre thrones, we built the fifth iteration of our seating pad.  The first two American ones were okay, but we left them in America.  The pink foam cushion cracked in half, and my folded therma-rest attacked Ben's legs and made them go to sleep.  The new cushion is a wedge of dual density foam, and proves's Nathan's superiority at designing beautiful and ergonomic creations out of materials that can only be manipulated with scissors.  Also, we were able to fix our fairing crunch with some bent aluminum plate and a wet layup, which made our car seem heavier when it weighed in at 200 kg.

Another great success was some debugging of our array.  Even the luck-bearing insect that we encapsulated into one of our panels was unable to ward away evil solar demons.  We did, however, discover the issues that were preventing us from getting as much power as our array should theorhetically be producing.  Between unwired cables, miswired cables, broken code, a short within a cell, and a short to the top shell, we have now diagnosed all of our problems, and even discovered solutions for most of them.  Our electrical team has been working around the clock, and their efforts are both appreciated and vital to the success of our team.

In short, great success.  Also, McDonalds has icee frozen drinks here, which is amazing, and well known by all solar car teams working on their cars at the Hidden Valley Racetrack.

“Lead to Solarcar. Dropbears ahead.”

by Ben

We're currently half way between Melbourne and Adelaide. NHS, who is currently driving, describes the scenery as "Like Nevada only with plants. Exactly like Age of Empires." It's been exactly the same for almost 500km so he has plenty of evidence to support this conclusion. Marvin! and Matt are on the look out for trebuchets.

In an enormous boost to our confidence, we have discovered that the truck we hired to carry the solarcar is slower than the solarcar itself. Significantly. It tops out at 90... kph. Based on our calculations, this is not quick enough to evade an average dropbear attack. More importantly, it's not going to be able to keep up with the solarcar during the race, so we may have to make some... modifications.

DC and solarcar, working as one

The biggest problem we faced during the 1 hour test drive was the extreme inaccuracy of our weather prediction systems

"There's no rain anywhere between here and Adelaide"

Here's another photo of the Australian countryside. If you look closely, you might be able to spot the solarcar in the foreground.

I carefully managed to avoid shooting the rain clouds

Solar Array Repositioning System

by matt

Today, we contracted SARS.  Also, it looks like we won't take delivery of the car until early next week because of a tsunami and the fact that our dirty old van will need to have its undercarriage steam-cleaned.

At first, when someone said that we needed SARS for the race, we instinctively reached for our Hello Kitty backpacks and felt around for our sterile facemasks.  Then,we made friends with a plumber.  Little did said plumber know that the 65 and up demographic has a 50% mortality rate, while our age group enjoys a mortality rate less than 1%.

Our plumber friend mostly told us about how he had designed rear seats for Ford Explorers.  His stories were voluminous, ranging from woman test drivers to something called a jubilee clamp.  While his presence was great, he distracted us from the task at hand, which was mathematics.  Nathan solicited Lucas, Marvin!, Lucy, and Matt to help him with the (not so) complex geometry of a right triangle, which proved to be useful as we created a monster--a polyvinyl chloride structure that we called SARS.

Everything Fits!

This structure is, simply stated, a one-axis solar tracker for the array of our solar car.  More specifically, it has approximately a 5 to 90 degree elevation range and should allow for simple adjustment and easy set-up and take down.  This means that during the race, we can tilt the top shell of our car towards the sun for more power generation when we are stopped.  These constraints led us to one thing: large diameter PVC.

Matt, Lucas, Daniel, and Nathan Assembling SARS

It started simply.  One of us coughed, and someone else contracted SARS.  Before long, most of the team was at some stage responsible for the spread of SARS to the Victoria Hall parking lot.  Terry, our plumber friend, was a-fixated on our SARS and felt the need to ward it off with incessant story-telling in a thick but surprisingly mumble-free Aussie accent.

Marvin! Degreasing/Priming the PVC

In between the stories, we (DC Posch, that is) managed to cut massive amounts of (not so) precision-cut piping.  Marvin was very skillful with a toothbrush at the task of degreasing and priming all of the joints. With the sheer strength of Lucas, our resident University of Kentucky Solar Car Team representative, we were able to attach these PVC pipes into a massive protein chain bent on destruction of many Asian countries in the year 2003.  After completing our masterpiece, we set out to celebrate at our gracious friends', the Tuckwells, who hosted Sasha and Ben before the rest of us arrived in this land.

There, we feasted on rare steak and avocado-themed salad, the former of which our vegatarian girls shied away from.  They were unaware that we had contracted SARS and that our celebration was in honor of SARS, and our general nerdy talk about SQUID's, the Czochralski process, and battery technology scared our gracious hosts away from the dinner table.  Thus ends the saga of SARS synthesis.