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What do water and sun have to do with engineering students? Each spring electrical and mechanical
engineering students from universities around the world gather to go boating, but these
are no ordinary boats they’re carefully drafted and powered by nothing more than the
sun.
The actual official title of this event is the International Intercollegiate Solar Electric
Boat Regatta and its official name is Solar Splash. We have a team this year from Turkey
that shipped their boat 7 thousand miles to come.
Our university is the Islam Technical University. It is our first time with Solar Splash. We
are working on our boat for 3 years.
The students work in teams and are constricted by many rules that dictate among other things
the size of the boat, the voltage and power strength, the battery type and the total weight
of the craft plus skipper, but within this rules, the students can be creative as they
want to be. And the result is a colorful display of very different looking boats.
We gotta cedar stripped boat this year, the same hull as last year but we’ve made some
modifications to our drive train and our electronic systems and brand new solar panels that my
team member James Suricher built.
The boat is a wood hull and it was cut to be pieced together and then is covered with
fiber glass so it’s a very nice hull.
The team’s rage is from 2 students to 10 or more with professors who serve as mentors
throughout the process and they meet on a regular basis throughout the year.
There are 2 major portions of the team. One is the mechanical side and the other is the
electrical engineering side. On the mechanical side the students design the hull and they
design the drive train and the our students build all the hardware that takes the motor
and allows it to interact with the propeller and driver of the boat. The electrical engineering
students made the solar panels, they select the batteries, they select the electric motors
and we build all the other stuff, we make it to where boat can go.
It’s very faculty dependent. If you have a faculty advisor at a school that wants to
do this, then it tends to happen. It does cost a bit money for these schools to do this,
I mean, the travel expenses are around 5 to 10 thousand dollars, the boat itself it’s
going to be at least 10 thousand dollars just for the materials to construct it so it’s
no mild undertaking.
While it’s there a competition, there’s also commeraderie. Everyone understands the
need to improve and realizes that there is a higher goal.
The solar electric boat race is, you know, a demonstration of engineers using alternative
energy and not being a sacrifice but showing what it can do.
If you do well in your technical report this year you can expected it will be handed out
to all the schools next year to look at. So they are trying to even up the plain field
and keep everybody helping one another so it’s a very open friendly environment.
The areas that students compete in include speed, endurance, maneuverability, workmanship
and the technical soundness of the boat. The competition can be intense, but it is always
sports man like.
There’s a lot of competition here, we’re glad about that. We’d like to see other
people do well and we like to have some competition with us.
So we got to figure out how to get more power in the spring, but we’ll get there.
Oh it’s a lot of fun. I’m enjoying it, a lot of nice people, talking with other teams,
helping them out if we can. They help us out so.
The ultimate goal of solar splash however is for the students to learn from their experiences
and to take what they have learned with them and take it to the work place and beyond.
We are going into the Navy and so you know you kind of have to feel the work with other
people and apply some of these things out in the ships as well, you know got the idea
of electrical engineering and the mechanical engineering side of things so you know it’s
practical beyond the academy as well.
If our students know about this technology, they know how to use it, they’ve been involved
in projects where they had to put it to competitive use, then they will fit into that system and
they will be able to make big impact for the country.
This is real world experience, it isn’t theory. Students like these from the University
of Arkansas and beyond are the ones who are going to go on and solve the energy problems
of tomorrow