Performance-based Solar Car is Ready for Competition
"Eliana" is the 15th solar car created by Team PrISum of the Iowa State University College of Engineering, and displays nearly 4 years of collaborative efforts. The team made several design modifications when compared to the preceding solar car, including a different Gallium Arsenide-based solar cell chemistry and a complete redesign of suspension architecture.
“For most of us, this is the most time and effort we’ve ever put into a project, and to have people cheering us on and wanting to come see the car we’re building means so much,” said Rachel Eckert, assistant project director for Team PrISUm . “This is such an exciting time for the team and it’s awesome to be able to share that excitement.”
Transcript
00:00:00 so today we unveiled PrISUm's 15th solar car Eliana. Eliana is a two passenger vehicle and we worked really hard to focus on performance for this car. We had a lot of university and sponsor friends watching us, they've supported us throughout the construction of this car and really it was a big way to say thank you to everyone who supported us for the for the four years that we've been working on this car. Well the first major difference between Penumbra and Eliana is that Eliana is almost exactly half of the weight some of that is because Penny, or Penumbra, had four passengers, we have two. a lot of the weight difference is also caused by a redesign of our suspension architecture. Essentially our suspension is glued to our car, whereas with Penumbra their suspension was welded to the roll cage and that's going to add some weight. What a fantastic design -
00:00:49 planning, design, manufacturing, execution, it's really one of our premier you know showcase student projects. Think about taking four years, they've got students from not only engineering but you know four colleges and upwards of 20 or so academic program majors, so it's really hard to identify a project i think that is more collaborative, more interdisciplinary and just really exciting to see. So now that we're done with our unveiling event we're going to start focusing on our race that we have in about five weeks from now is when we start, and between now and then we're going to be putting hopefully hundreds of miles of testing into the car to make sure things aren't gonna break um if things are gonna break we're able to find them and fix them. We're also gonna be focusing on making our car meet regulations, we have a lot of stuff we have to add to our car that doesn't so much make it look pretty, but does make it legal to race.