The racecar Delta, which runs on compressed natural gas, will be UCI’s entry into the 2016 UCI Energy Invitational. This energy time trial challenges race teams to cover as much distance as they can in one hour using only one dollar of energy. Delta has taken first place several times in recent years falling to third place this past 2015. …
UCI’s Mini-Baja race team is one of 100 teams registered for competition in the 2016 Mini-Baja California competition to occur in Gorman, CA. Twenty more teams are waitlisted. A glance at the list of teams available at the link, http://students.sae.org/cds/bajasae/west/teams/ shows that the teams are from around the world, with several from India and China.
This week we accomplished a major milestone for this quarter by completing performance mapping associated with the engine/generator test bed. Running engine while varying the loads between 0-40 kW at increments of 10 kW, we recorded the emissions data for NOx and CO, estimated the flow rate of the natural gas entering the system, and calculated the engine efficiency. In …
Smitty, our all-knowing advisor, told us that custom exhaust systems are something he would only do with two guns to his head. However, it’s too late to save us – we’ve already started. The way the stock exhaust for our engine was routed would put the headers outside the envelope of the chassis, scraping against the ground when we drove. …
Our problem with centricity was that we had no feasible way to keep our wheel centric on the axis of rotation. Hub-centricity was not possible, as the hub hole had been cut away for “weight saving” purposes. Lug-centricity was out of the question, as a technical judge required us to obtain permission from the wheel manufacturer to countersink our lug …
A racecar’s wheels need to be mounted to hubs – in our case, there are five studs sticking out of the hubs that hold our wheel on with lugs. However, because there is some play between the holes in the wheel and the lugs, there needs to be a method of keeping the wheels from moving around on the hub; …
Our Suspension Doesn’t Work Too Well Let’s be honest: our team was hard pressed to reach our goal of a rolling chassis for the Winter Design Review last quarter – so hard pressed, in fact, that we achieved our goal at 2AM on the morning of the design review. When we finally hammered the last bolt through its stubborn hole, …
On March 4th, our team took the next step toward gathering the necessary data to start drawing conclusions regarding the specifications and feasibility of our planned data center. Recently, we purchased, received, and assembled an anemometer, a common instrument used in weather stations. The device will collect wind speed data from a perch on top of UCI’s Engineering Tower. This …
Racecar Zeta Electric is running. By Lewis Munshi, Racecar Zeta
This week, adjustments were made to the Venturi flow meter design. The new calculated dimensions of the pipe can be seen in the Solidworks Drawing file. These dimensions were changed because of a modification to the flow calculations. Also, because the Venturi is going to be connected to the hose attached to the radiator, the flow meter needs to fit …
