Stanford students show off solar-powered car
And, by the way, it is highway approved.
"About two weeks ago, I was driving on 101 in San Francisco and this thing passed me," said Jennifer Westerbeck, coordinator of Alisal High School's engineering academy. "I thought to myself, 'How cool,' and I actually followed it to a little warehouse" at Stanford.
That is where she met the driver, Ben Stabler, and Nathan Hall-Snyder and Alice Che, members of the Stanford Solar Car Project, a program that has produced nine solar vehicles since it was founded in 1989.
"We get a lot of strange looks when we're on the highway," said Stabler, a sophomore from London who served as the electrical team leader on the project. "Everybody who sees us gets out their camera phones."
The space-age machine they showcased at Alisal -- "The Apogee" -- weighs about 400 pounds and can travel at 75 mph for about two hours, or at 40 mph forever, using the type of solar panels installed in houses.
The car can run for two hours on battery power if there is no sun, and can drive across the U.S. on a gallon of gasoline.
Stanford students designed and built it in two years, entered it in a world competition last fall in Australia, and drove it almost 1,900 miles without using a drop of fossil fuel.
"When you're running at around 40 mph, this car uses about half the electricity that your hair dryer uses. That's how efficient it is," said Hall-Snyder, a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering. "If the sun's shining, you can run all day on solar power. On a rainy day, it doesn't do as well."
Hall-Snyder, who built a car from scratch as a high school student in Park City, Utah, worked on the brakes, the steering and a lot of the design work. Stabler spearheaded the team on electrical issues. What they created is a vast improvement over the vehicle produced by the original team in 1989.
That car weighed more than 1,000 pounds, was more than 20 feet long, had solar panels about 12 square meters, and "looked like a big, ugly cockroach," Hall-Snyder said.
The newest version is mostly lightweight, carbon-fiber materials that are six times stronger than steel, with paneling similar to the kind used on the space shuttle. It has a more efficient aerodynamic design, all of which enabled the Stanford team to place 10th out of 30 teams and fourth in its class at the race in Australia.
"It's actually very noisy," Hall-Snyder said. "The most efficient way to drive the motor is using magnetic fields, which click very loudly when they turn on and off. So you have to wear earplugs."
The car has one gear and accelerates from zero to 60 mph in about 11 seconds.
As for practicality?
"It's unlikely that solar cars that look like this one will ever be on the road, mostly because carbon-fiber materials are so expensive, but there's a car called the Aptera 2E that will be on the market in about two years," Hall-Snyder said. "That one looks more like a solar car than any car that's on the road today, and it'll get about 300 miles to the gallon."
But the Stanford project is worthwhile, he believes.
"It serves as a test bed for new technologies, and it demonstrates how cool engineering is," he said. "It shows what solar, and green, and electrical-vehicle technology can do when you take it to the cutting edge."
COMMENTARY: Stanford's solar-powered car is called Apogee. I am disappointed that the car, a product of such a prestigious educational institution as Stanford, and known for its engineer school, could only muster a 10th place win in Australia. I bet Larry Page and Sergey Brin aren't too happy about that. Click here for the official Stanford Solar Car Project website. A story and pictures of the Stanford team preparing the Apogee for the Australian race can be read here.
Courtesy of an article dated February 24, 2010 appearing in RenewablesBiz
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