Composites car on display at SLCC's Westpointe Workforce Training & Education Center.
Salt Lake Community College and the University of Utah are
continuing a collaboration on the construction of a working electric car, whose
body is primarily made of composite materials. The duo entered a vehicle in a
national competition this past year and is gearing up to compete again in 2020
with a new model, with improvements being made to the original design.
The interview below about the collaboration between the U of
U and SLCC, the car itself and the competition is with SLCC composites instructor and U of U materials science and engineering student Zachary Ingrey.
Zachary Ingrey
Which departments at the
University of Utah are involved with the composites car?
It pretty much exclusively
runs through the Mechanical Engineering department. We work with students of
any discipline. One of the purposes of the competition has a business side
element to it. We work with a lot of business students, who help keep track of
our finances and help with the sponsors. We have mechanical engineers,
electrical engineers and computer science majors.
Last year was the first
year partnering with SLCC. What brought you guys over to the Westpointe Campus?
We needed a new place. One of
our teammates heard about Westpointe opening up, so, we came and toured it and
met Pete (Pete Reed, program manager for the composites program at SLCC). And
Pete was very, very interested in helping us out. We were kind of desperate,
but it all fell into place, and Westpointe was beyond what we even needed. It
was really great to use the space (at Westpointe Workforce Training & Education Center).
For the upcoming year it
sounds like there will be a special class that current and former students can
take to be a part of the team?
We are on the road to
completely merging our team underneath the University of Utah to become a
University of Utah and SLCC team. We are sponsored by both institutions, and we
are a joint team where both students can join. We are hoping for participation
from people who are planning on transferring from SLCC to the U engineering
program or the business program, to get them interested early and building
their resumes with this project.
Can anyone sign-up for the
team or do you get to choose?
You don’t have to be a
part of our club or anything. SLCC is offering this as a class to become part of the team, and the cost will be $50, which goes toward funding the team's efforts. We use Slack, which is a workplace app organizer,
to communicate between members of the team. We use that, and we have our team
divided up into smaller teams. We have teams over controls, tractive, chassis
and an admin drive and suspension team. Each of those sub-teams has a team
leader. I am the team lead of the aerodynamics team. I have five or six people
on my team, and we work together. I communicate with the other team leaders to
make sure our teams are working together. We design around each other.
Take us through the design
process. How does it break down to a team level?
We have a space at the U
where we do all of our electrical design. We build the battery packs by hand.
We build a lot of other electric components as well. They will build everything
like the wiring harness there, but our space is relatively small, so we don’t
have room to lay out our chassis. We basically have our design phase that
starts in the summer and goes until December. And then from January until our
competition in June is the manufacturing and testing. Coming up here by the end
of Christmas break is our end of design, and then there are no more changes to
the car. We use our CAD models that we designed and then remanufacture the car
every year.
U of U student Kohl Schoensee.
What is the competition?
There are a bunch of
different competitions, but we only go to one of them. They basically have an
East Coast and a West Coast competition, and those are the only two that have
an electric car competition. Because there is an internal combustion engine
section as well (and that’s what most teams do), there are a few hundred teams
competing in that. I’m sure in the coming years we will see more electric
competitions. I mean it is pretty much the future. When our team formed, we
pretty much went right to the electric and didn’t really do the internal
combustion. We wanted to be where the future is going.
What exactly do they test
you on in these competitions?
There are a lot of different things.
They obviously test all of your design. They want to see that you validated
your design and didn’t just come up with something randomly. They want to see
you did the math, the analysis and simulations to see if the parts would work.
The business aspect entails having to present this car as if you were going to
build 1,000 of them. You have to give a presentation as if you were going to
mass produce this car, covering cost to build, ease of manufacturing, etc. Cars
that have fewer work hours or less cost associated with it earn more points. Tests
include acceleration, braking, cornering, skid pad, and then the big fun
test at the end is the endurance race.
How did the competition go
last year?
Last year we registered for
competition, and we were having a lot of trouble with our battery packs. We
were having trouble getting the power to the motor and getting the motor
spinning. We got super close to competing in the dynamic event but did not
pass. We still did the business presentation. The competition is so difficult.
There is a large number of teams that can’t compete in all of the events. So,
it is definitely survival of the fittest.
Are there any SLCC
students currently on the team?
Right now, we have three SLCC welding students
on the chassis team. They are designing the roll hoops. Basically, we have a
carbon fiber chassis, but we have to have a steel roll bar. The SLCC students are
working on redesigning that because the one from last year was not designed
that well, and it was also manufactured poorly. So, that is something we are
hoping to solve this year with the welding students, because they are going to
know how to make everything square and how to bend the tubes better. Having
SLCC student perfect the roll bar will be one of the huge advantages that we
will see from this year over last year.