In finalizing the shell for the Raisbeck Aviation High School Green Energy Team’s Solar Car, the objective was to find the best-designed aerodynamic model. As the structural and mechanical design lead, I worked to complete and test our models in both Autodesk Flow and Siemens STAR-CCM+, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. CFD software essentially creates […]
The RAHS Green Energy Team has been hard at work constructing the new and improved chassis for this year’s race! We started the build process by creating a jig to ensure the chassis is in accordance with our design specifications and the Solar Car Challenge safety requirements. Alignment of core structural members was key to […]
We are finally wrapping up the design phase and transitioning into building our second solar car. We plan to remain faithful to the first design’s successes while making significant changes to the exterior layout and solar array. The most fundamental change is to the body of the car: In order to reduce drag, we’ve moved […]
For the past two weeks, we have been working day and night on our first “mock-pit” design for the solar car. The frame is assembled out of our scrap metal and plywood sheets, the bars connected together with plywood gussets. Our most daunting challenge is that we have to ensure the driver can get out […]
Last week, our team mounted and wired the six solar panels on top of the car’s solar panel rack! This major milestone is what makes our car solar! Each panel is laye on top of an aluminum panel rack that provides structural support to each panel. The rack is attached to the car with two […]
As we are starting to focus on finishing up the structure of the car, we have a lot of welding to get done putting on structural supports. George, our team welder, has been helping other students on the team learn how to weld. As you can see in the picture to the right, there are […]
Since our last post we’ve been hard at work and a lot has happened. We’ve gone from CAD models to the testing track in the span of a couple weeks, and we are excited to keep moving forward towards competition. As July draws ever closer, the pressure and pace of work has increased dramatically. With […]
Our custom solar panels just arrived last week after much planning and preparation. The panels are semi-flexible and should be highly efficient, but their fragility means we can’t do much with them until we have a secure place to mount them for further testing. Consequently, we have begun to design the panel rack which will […]
As per the brake team’s last post, Starting to Stop, we are in the process of designing a brake pedal that will successfully actuate the calipers of the car, via steel brakes, once mounted to the suspension. In that post, we highlighted the pedal we would be mounting onto the levers by showing a screenshot of the […]
Brake Levers Since our initial post, we have acquired new brake levers that will likely be the final iteration of our cable design for the prototype car. The levers will be attached via steel brake cables to calipers mounted to the suspension. To pull the lever, we are manufacturing a unique pedal to place upon […]
