UBC Chem-E-Car is one of 22 undergraduate teams recognized as an Engineering Design Team. We specialize in safely transforming potential energy stored in chemicals to mechanical energy as well as accurate control of chemical reactions for use as chemical timing.
We compete in the annual American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Chem-E-Car competition. The competition involves making a shoe-box sized car travel a certain distance with a given cargo in under 2 minutes. To complicate the otherwise trivial task, the car’s stopping mechanism must be chemical – which means no physical or electronic clocks or sensors can be used for stopping. Moreover, we do not know the cargo or the distance to travel until the hour before competition (or in the case of 2013 Regionals the 30 minutes) – in which time we must also mix all of our chemicals. Thus, it is crucial to have adequate knowledge of our chemical reactions to be able to calculate the required chemicals and then carefully mix them within the 1 hour time constraint.
Safety is now a big part of the competitions, in past years teams had rocket designs that would leave liquids on the race track and apparently cases of pressurized vessels blowing apart and in some cases hitting observers. In more recent years, AIChE has cracked down on safety and required teams to have a Job Safety Assessment (JSA) included in the required Engineering Design Package (EDP). Although, not as glamorous as building the car the JSA and EDP provide students with the opportunity to spend endless hours ensuring their documentation is at industry standard. Materials used in construction must be chemically compatible with reactants, intermediates and products which limits the selection of components used, for example: the use of aluminium is often avoided due to chemical reactions with acids and bases. Before attending competition, 10 hrs of runs must be logged with the car and signed off by our department sponsor (professor) as a safe car to compete with. A department sponsor must also witness and sign off on our pressure tests (2x max operating pressure) for all pressurized components. The EDP (with JSA included) easily reaches over 100 pages in paper work.
For more information on rules, please refer to AIChE’s competition rules.
As far as we know, we are the only team from Western Canada competing in the AIChE Chem-E-Car competition and the only Canadian team to qualify for the 2013 or 2014 National competition. As such, we feel that we must represent not only B.C.’s chemical technology but also Canada’s chemical technology. We view our car innovations as being more important than winning a competition, so we decide to display novel and important reactions using innovative designs that can safely control these reactions. In 2012/2013, we showed off B.C.’s prowess in hydrogen technology by producing our own hydrogen inside a pressure vessel on board our shoe-box sized vehicle with a sodium-borohydride reaction. Strong solutions of sodium borohydride meet US DOE ultimate targets for hydrogen storage. For a quick comparison, in 2012/2013 all other teams using fuel cells filled prebuilt tanks with hydrogen provided – we were the only team with a student produced hydrogen (one other team had off-board hydrogen production but were not allowed to use it for safety reasons).
UBC Chem-E-Car 