High School Outreach

This weekend three of our team members and our graduate supervisor volunteered about 6 hours each to be a part of a high school out reach program. Having the clear iodine clock was really nice because it allowed the students to see color change and the vehicle stopping as a result. It got a some gasps and inspired many questions.

On Sunday we decided to put our engineering on the spot as well by keeping track of where the car stopped and trying to hit the same point 3 times in a row. We were a little rushed for preparing chemicals – so we free poured using graduated cylinders instead of the much more accurate pipettes. We were able to hit the same spot twice – and the last run was less than a meter off. Please see the tape on the floor marking our final results from Sunday.

Dehydrated water mobile’s iodine clock works well, even when simply chemicals are measured with graduated cylinders instead of pipettes!

Back to the Lab

Now that we’re back from the National Competition, it’s time to get new team members involved in the lab work. Below you can see Colleen (our Chemical lead) setting up the iodine clock reaction. We produce triioide at known rate, in the beaker there are two competing reactions using the triiodide. Once Sodium Thiosulfate is used (a limiting reactant competing for triiodide), the solution transitions rapidly from clear to black, and much to the surprise of our new team members. We wish we could have recorded their reactions to the first time they saw the clock reaction!

Colleen preparing to show the new 2014 UBC Chem-E-Car team members the iodine clock reaction for the first time.

Fuel Cell lacked power

On the Thursday night before flying out for the AIChE conference we were doing some last minute testing for our car. We noticed that we had extremely low power output. After a few hours of sourcing replacement fuel cells, we found one that could be shipped overnight to the hotel in San Francisco. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any hydrogen to test or condition the fuel cell – the first time we were able to test the fuel cell was at the competition. Unfortunately, we were not able to draw enough power out of the fuel cell. And therefore couldn’t move our car.

We’ve learned a lot from building the car and the conference experience, unfortunately we were not able to compete. The competition wasn’t an entire failure as we managed to pass rigorous safety inspections as well as convince the safety committee at AIChE that Sodium Borohydride can be handled safely. In fact, even during competition – they were skeptical and were watching us make hydrogen. After we created a (standard – for us) batch of hydrogen, the safety inspector announced to us: “this is really novel.”

We set out to be at the forefront of innovation, with creative designs and chemistry. Although our car was not able to compete – we accomplished something greater:
1. Safely displaying controlled reactions with a chemical that was previously “feared” by some people.
2. Displaying hydrogen generation on-board a vehicle.

We’re back to the design phase and will be designing and manufacturing batteries to showcase on our 2014 vehicle.