Students experimenting with the fuel of the future

By Browning Brooks

FSU Communications Group

To engineering students who had spent months building a solar-powered car, a qualifying trip to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway June 13 might as well have been the Indy 500.

"This is our first time to enter but everything looks pretty good," said Dave Bryant, senior electrical engineering major at Florida A&M/FSU College of Engineering. "Our frame was designed by a drag racer and our car is a lot stronger than most of the other cars."

Alas, their creation, a steel and fiberglass model with 450 solar cells, rolled 70 miles on the Indy track on a gray day, short of the 100 miles required to compete in Sunrayce '97. Sunrayce, held a week later, was a 1,200-mile competition from Indianapolis to Colorado Springs sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.

"Though they didn't make the race, it was a big thrill and the kids came back all fired up," said electrical engineering Professor Tom Harrison, the project director. "They built a solar car from start to finish and did a tremendous job. This is not an easy competition by any measure."

The race pushes engineering students to address the major problem with solar-powered cars - their limited range, Harrison said. The engineering school's vehicle, which can go faster than 50 mph and has a cruising speed of about 35 mph, was designed to complete the journey under its own power, its batteries recharging with solar power alone.

"With six batteries, it's very close to being an electric car," Bryant said.

In fact, the City of Tallahassee Electric Department, Ford Motor Company, the DOE and others contributed financial support to the project. FSU's Public Broadcast Center provided space to work on the car.

The students found their vehicle to be in good mechanical shape but a bit homely compared to the sleek cars from universities that have competed in Sunrayce for years and are backed by big bucks.

"Ours is kind of boxy, not as aerodynamic as the others, and we're planning to improve it," said senior electrical engineering major Alvin Collins.

"Our kids were competing with schools that had more advanced cars made out of composite materials and with as many as 800-900 solar cells," Harrison said. "We did a postmortem when we got back, and the students had picked up a lot of ideas."

The mechanical engineering, industrial engineering and electrical engineering students said it's one thing to learn principles from a book - and quite another to put them to work in the shop.

"The learning experience was the biggest thing, working together as a team and trying to meet deadlines," said Bryant. "To build a car from scratch for a cross-country race is hard. But all the teams helped each other out."

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