In 2017 Australia achieved something truly remarkable, something so enviably world-class it should have made us prouder than anything any actor, musician or sports person has done.
Twenty-two Australian students not only beat 41 other 100% solar-powered cars represented by 20 other countries, they eclipsed rival teams with intimidating pedigree from the USA, South Africa and Singapore to name a few.
The 2019 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge is officially counting down to its October 13 start, where Western Sydney University engineering students and their team will tackle the intellect of some of the world’s cleverest young people and battle the heat of Australia’s Stuart Highway from Darwin to Adelaide.
The aim is to build an entirely self-sustaining vehicle that only uses the electricity derived from photovoltaic solar cells absorbing the sun’s rays.Then, teams must get themselves through checkpoints to the finish line 3000km away before anyone else.
Three classes are designed to achieve three different things: Adventure is a non-competitive class; Cruiser is the efficient, practical class taking more than one person; and then there’s Challenger, the class for the fast.
University of Michigan was the team to beat in 2017, with nine national championships and a team of 70 students – even a cheer squad by the looks of their website – our Aussie battlers from Western Sydney, managed to outgun Goliath, as it were.
Team leader Saamiul Bashar is not only incredibly knowledgeable about the world around us in ways most people simply cannot fathom, he’s also a really nice bloke.
“Air is not like a standard fluid, it changes behaviour as you increase your speed; the air around a family car behaves differently to that of a Formula One car, which is different again to a commercial airliner,” he begins.
Bashar not only speaks with conviction and passion for his craft, but he starts with the bare essential principles needed for designing a solar car, conveying the detail of such a challenge to a journalist who would routinely drop the sump plug in the drip tray when servicing his own car.
“In this car it doesn’t have pressure drag, it’s mostly skin friction and that’s negligible.But what that means is because the car is so streamlined, we have to make special considerations because the tiniest amount of friction matters,” he explains.
To illustrate, an F1 car doing 40km/h from Darwin to Brisbane won’t be aerodynamically affected by the air, but it is at 200km/h in a two-hour race.Comparatively, Bashar’s solar car is affected doing relatively low speeds for thousands of kms along a dead straight road for days on end.Every bump, seam, rivet and moulding affects the car’s drag.
Even sponsorship stickers, which can be as thin as a tenth of a millimetre, are considered too protrusive.Bashar’s team clear-coated over the entire car’s surface and sanded it back.
One of the advantages team Michigan had working against our Aussies, was the resource of a wind tunnel, courtesy of backing from none other than General Motors.
“Being a small team allows for diversity; engineers and students can go into places where it might not seem right – you can think differently about problems that don’t require resources,” assistant manager Max Mammone says.
“We just love building solar cars, lots of our work is voluntary.So bigger teams in spite of having more man power, won’t go to the level of detail we do, spending 100 hours a week each on the car,” Bashar says.
“But you don’t get to validate the real-world performance before competition like you do in a wind tunnel.With the budget we had to build at the level needed to win a race, compared to some other teams, they could build their car six times,” he’s pleased to compare the humble Aussie team to.
The car, called Unlimited 2.0 because it’s the team’s second-generation solar car based on the catamaran design, is exactly on the minimum permitted weight according to the 2017 regulations.
Thinking like proper F1 team bosses, the guys even skirted a technicality when it came to demonstrating the maximum/minimum required turning circle, which meant navigating a series of cones.
“Our car was high enough to perform the turn but with the nose gliding over the top of the cones; nowhere in the rules does it say we can’t go over the cones,” Mammone laughs.
“It took six hours of redesign to make the U-turn test, trimming body panels, squeezing extra steering angle,” he adds.When was the last time you dedicated six hours to perfecting something? Tape was also a secret weapon in their emergency repairs and in-flight modifications go-bag.
Tyres were also a major contributing factor to tasting champagne at the finish line.As the only physical contact between the carbon-fibre Quasi Modo and the coarse chip Stuart Hwy, the tyres developed with Bridgestone solely for this race, were their ace in the hole.
“These tyres state on the sidewall, ‘Not to be used for accelerating, braking or turning’, which was very true – braking from 95km/h you would tear through the belt,” Bashar reveals.
“According to the data sets we have, the Bridgestones were half a per cent more efficient than our old set, which could mean 10 minutes at the end or having to fix a puncture – even the tyres’ aerodynamics is optimised for this car which is also designed to do exactly 85km/h,” he explains.
Weight is the other enemy of a solar car race, which Bashar says they went to painstaking lengths to reduce, even at a multi-purpose level.
“Wherever we could cut weight we did, everything has as many functions as possible,” he explains.
“There are sections of tape that are structural, we have space-grade aluminium wheel hubs which, after 15,000km, have started rocking in the mounting.”
While the guys are adamant the inter-team camaraderie and competition is both real and healthy, there is still a level of motorsport style secrecy between designs, materials, and ingenuity.A humble photo of the internals is barred, understandably, because the intellectual edge one idea offers over next year’s competition – who’ve had the same amount of time to re-think and improve for 2019 – could be the difference between victory and “nearly won”.
“Everything on this car is on it because it’s the best item available, if it wasn’t readily available, we’d make our own,” Bashar says proudly.
“The only thing we couldn’t control was the solar cells, and that’s primarily down to cost,” he explains.
In Australian sporting anecdotes, we often reference ice skater Steven Bradbury, who famously came from an unflattering fourth to win when would-be podium-getters fell flat on their faces in the Salt Lake City 1000m some 17 years ago.
Australia loves to celebrate the funny irony that we won that race, as a country with bugger all snow and ice, and even less pedigree in ice skating, beating America and the defending world champion from Canada.The world was stunned, including Bradbury himself.
But Bashar, Mammone and their team didn’t just get lucky taking on the might of the world in the solar challenge, they also sweated, dehydrated, and worked for countless hours through the years, day and night, to not only design and build a world-beating car powered by the sun, they did it against a formidable opponent who was a shoe-in for gold.
Despite their momentous achievement, Australia – the sunburnt country, doesn’t recognise their solar car heroism in metaphor and CEO dinner speeches.And the Western Sydney team still had to sit their exams at the end of 2018.
World Solar Challenge 2019 runs, very efficiently, from October 13-20.
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