Meeting Notes 10/15/2010

Hey everyone, Just an update, we have requested Feb 26 or 27th (Saturday or Sunday) for our makeup day for today.

Everyone wishing to participate must get training, i sent everyone the list last week, please mark your calendars to see if you can go to one of them.  I’m still trying to get someone to come to the school like last year.  I know that would be easier for most everyone. I’ll keep everyone updated if i hear anything about that.

We filled out the paperwork for Buffalo wild wings fundraising, lets hope that works out well, we’ll ask for volunteers when more info comes available.  I would ultimately like everyone make some effort to stand somewhere on campus and hand them out. It would be good to try to coordinate times and where.  But we can talk about that when the times comes.

We are going to build a spot welder here in the next few weeks to gear up for the new battery pack.  I came up with a great idea (i hope) that will make the construction of the battery pack relevantly simple, cheap and easy to swap batteries (all 3 of the criteria for our team ) More on that as design is finalized.

Mechanical team talked in depth about the design of the chassis specifically starting with the wheels.  There has been some debate and ideas on what to do about the rims.  For now we will assume we will use the same rims as we do now (probably steal the spares to make sure everything works if we havn’t gotten them in.  I also found a really expensive alternative (1500 a rim) http://www.ghcraft.com/shops/cfw/cfw_e.htm these are the rims standford are using.  So if anyone finds a good cheap rim we could use for the car (14-16″ light weight rims).  Maybe we can just design our own =).  (only 1/2 kidding).

The tests were done on the old car to get our baseline complete.  She’s a tough little car.  I’ll let Mike post the results from that as well as his comments on each test and how its gonna effect the design.

Amy will have pictures and videos up when she gets time.

Team Photos!

We couldn’t get everyone together at once, so we got 2 pictures.  Even got the Dean in one of them!

Twitter

SIUE now has a twitter account, this will get updated as we progress though our project.

Welcome Back!

New Road!!!

Saturday I went to the heating plant and found workers putting in a new road for us!!! I took some pics (see the “photos” page). Then, on Monday I took more pics of the unfinished road. (I assume it’s unfinished… although I’m NOT a road expert). Thanks to Veronica (dean’s office) for your help and support of the Solar Car Club!!!

Solar Cell Data

Those of you who were supposed to check the current of the solar cells, the sr. design team took care of it.  To prove it here’s a wonderful graph of current vs. voltage.  This graph shows that the solar cells are current sources.

Update on Batteries

The 404 group meet with Dr. Lozowski yesterday to talk about the direction we should take with the battery pack and made great progress. Here’s some bullets that will also be covered in our 404 presentation Monday @ 12 (for those who wish to come watch it, not sure if you can but I don’t see why not)

• Instead of building multiple “packs”  we will now make a modular design where rows of batteries can be removed from the “pack”,  this is good for several reasons: 1. makes it easy to remove and store the batteries during the race.  2. if we find a dead battery the module can be removed from the pack and replaced quickly and the bad module can be fixed when time allows.  3. Allows us to make a pack utilizing all 30kg of batteries allowed by NASC.
• The solar cells will be arranged in a 3 x 2 arrangement, 2 parallel combination of 3 in series.  This gives us ~ 60 volts of power which is close to the 71 volts lowest voltage the pack will provide, this gives us the best efficiency with the dc to dc converter.
• We have a direction to go in monitoring the pack as well as balancing the charge across the batteries, more info will be provided when we are finished designing/researching it.

Everything seems to be moving along quite well, hopefully the body will be ready for the pack when we finish it *wink wink nudge nudge*

Also, talked to Steve Muren yesterday, he told me that we have a guy that will make a mold for the carbon fiber, we just have to provide the design.  If anyone wants to get the dimensions of the car and start tinkering with designs maybe something with some aerodynamics (jake???)  that’d be awesome.

Events Calendar Up!

I just put a google calendar page up. Please email me if you would like access to add events on there. Thanks!