Congrats to new and returning members of the new 2015 UBC Chem-E-Car team!
Click here to view the roster.
Another Evening of Progress….
January 13, 2015
Our band of chemical engineers have made more progress as another module in the electronics controller is complete. A new tool for more precision in the stopping mechanism perhaps?
Monday December 15, 2014
Members Present:
- Norvin Ng
- Abhijeet Kamble
- Athanasios Kritharis
- William Gumboc
A little bit of a late post but a good amount of progress was made and the car seems to be progressing along with the design phase. A substantial amount of electronics was purchased and updates to the car chassis design and a rework of the stopping mechanism idea was made today.
Next tentative meeting, December 29, 2014.
Sometimes we run a little long
UBC Chem-E-Car ties for 8th of 36 from around the world
This weekend we traveled down to Atlanta to represent the Pacific Northwest Region at the National AIChE competition. Competing against 35 other teams from USA, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Poland, South Korea and Malaysia we managed to place 8th out of 36 teams.
The competition was a lot of fun and we met some very friendly teams from Texas, Virginia, Petronas and San Jose – and of course meeting up with the WSU team. Thanks to all the event organizers that helped make this happen and to all the competitors for a great showing.
Polarization curves
We went to the electrochem lab to capture polarization curves for our zinc-air batteries. Internal resistance is a nice ~34.5 mOhms. The capacity of the load bank was 5A and our batteries were still going strong! We will have to scale down the batteries to see the end of our polarization curve. We were able to pull > 3W with each cell and can get more (how much more we don’t yet know). Thanks for reading!
Prototype batteries
The last couple weeks have been productive. We’ve designed our test batteries to determine an optimal size of battery for our purposes. What size do you think will be closest to optimal? 1, 4, 9, or 16 cm^2? Let us know on our facebook page.
Design tutorials
We have recently been holding tutorials to train the majority of our new members to use Solidworks software. For the tutorial, the new members designed some test batteries to be fabricated for optimizing battery size for our new car. The tutorial not only gave us the parts that we needed but allowed new members to design a part that will be fabricated on their first day of using Solidworks.
We’ve also been working on our next iodine clock. We don’t want to be over confident, but we think it’s going to be the kittens mittens. Look forward to seeing the fabricated prototypes in the coming months!
Back in action!
UBC Chem-E-Car is back in action! We’ve had two team meetings with our new members so far. We’ll be holding a Solidworks workshop in about a weeks time to get new team members familiar with Solidworks, their first task being to design battery casings of various sizes. The various sizes will be used to determine a more reasonable battery size for the 2015 Chem-E-Car. At the same time, our more experienced members are getting ready to ship chemicals to Atlanta for the National Chem-E-Car competition and trying to raise funds to make this year’s experience the most memorable yet!
We recently gave an update for the AMS Sustainability which can be seen at the following link.
2014 Plastic Metals places 1st and will be heading to Atlanta!
Our start from scratch 2014 project (Plastic Metals) had a very good run stopping just 39.5 cm of the target distance! This was close enough to place 1st at the PNW Regional Chem-E-Car and qualify for a spot at the annual AIChE National competition.
We’re now going to have to start looking into fundraising for the trip to compete at the AIChE National Chem-E-Car Competition. As of yet, we do not know of another Canadian team qualifying for the National competition (will update if we find another), so we might be solely representing Canada again! If you’re interested in helping us get to Atlanta in the fall or interested in donating items/equipment towards the project – please contact us at ubc.chem-e@live.ca.
A big thanks goes out to UBC Rapid for helping us print out components for our car, the UBCs Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering for lab space and support, and SolidWorks for providing drafting software. Also thanks to the Shell Engineering Student Engineering fund and UBCs Professional Activities Fund for financial support. And one last thanks to WSU for hosting this year’s conference!
UBC Chem-E-Car 