Luminos: Innovative Teardrop-Shaped, Solar-Powered Race Car
A team of Stanford University students has created Luminos, a lightweight, teardrop-shaped car, which is topped with solar panels that generate all the electricity the car needs to run. The team developed custom 97% efficient solar car electric motors – a significant improvement over the industry-standard 93% – and a unique solar panel encapsulation process for increased power. Weighing in at just 375 pounds, Luminos generates less than half the aerodynamic drag of a cyclist and can cruise continuously at highway speeds on solar power alone. Luminos is competing against 47 other teams in the 2013 World Solar Challenge, a 2000-mile trek across the Australian Outback.
Transcript
00:00:00 [SOUND] Stanford University. [MUSIC] >> The World's Solar Challenge is a 2,000 mile race across the Australian outback. Where 47 teams from 26 countries compete to travel across the Outback as quickly as they can using sun power alone. We actually start from the ground up and build a brand new vehicle from scratch. So, while some teams will use old designs, the Stanford team tries to build a radically new vehicle every two years. >> It is a really fun engineering challenge just
00:00:50 because it's so big and covers so many different fields. So there are real challenges in the computer science. Real challenges in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering aspects. And it's just really fun to work in a collaborative environment. [MUSIC] >> Not only does our team do all the design work, we have almost all the machinery that we need to actually manufacture the entire car itself here on campus. We'll have students manufacturing carbon fiber composites. All of our electronic boards are designed and assembled by students.
00:01:18 We even have CNC machines that allow us to manufacture all of the lightweight aluminum components for the vehicle. With that capability our team has a lot of freedom to really advance the boundaries of clean vehicles. [MUSIC] This year our team will use prototype film for solar panels. If you were to take a microscope and look at this film, you'll actually see there's small little ridges that run along the film, so when the sun is at low angles in the sky, the ridges capture more light that would otherwise bounce off.
00:01:46 [MUSIC] This year our team also spent a lot of time optimizing and designing the air body of the vehicle. This is the first time that our team has actually able to do wind tunnel testing on our vehicle. The facility that we went to, the customer before us, the customers after us were all stock car racing teams and a lot of the expertise that goes into developing those cars transfers directly into our car. [MUSIC]
00:02:08 >> We wanted to make a car that was very reliable. Just because the race is so long and so grueling. You might have only one or two cars that can make it through the entire race without some sort of major breakdown. >> The road will be raced in Australia is actually like much nastier than most roads in the state. They're very narrow two lane. You have a lot of rubble on them. A lot of potholes you can have things like dust devils, really high side winds, fire tornadoes.
00:02:32 So, if your car is not stable in really high cross winds, if your suspension falls apart under really high dynamic loads, you're not going to make it very far. [MUSIC] >> When I'm driving I usually get a prompt from the chase vehicle to set a cruise speed. So I set that cruise speed on my console and then from there my job is to look for anything on the road and we have no play in the steering. So the steering is very immediate. So it demands a lot more attention than a normal car.
00:03:03 >> The true value of the project is really the education that the engineers and students get on it. You're never done. There are always more improvements you can make and when you have to make something that's efficient that's way more than making something that just works because you really have to understand every little part of it at a very deep level. >> Going to 2013, it's tough to tell who is going to be the top team in the challenge class, but the Stanford team with our focus on making the vehicle very reliable, but also efficient we're
00:03:30 relatively confident especially with the testing we've done so far that we should be able to beat the vast majority of the teams in the World's Solar challenge and place somewhere in the top five this year. [MUSIC]