Before the World Solar Challenge all solar race cars will scrutinized by technical observers of the WSC organisation to see if the cars have been built by the rules. The solar panel may have a maximum active surface of six square meters and also the outside measurements have to lie within certain limits. The battery has to be within its own weight limit and it has to be sealed so that it can’t be charged sneakily during a stop – all energy for the vehicles has to come from the sun. The race driver has to able to exit the car without assistance within fifteen seconds. All these requirements are to ensure the safety of the teams and also to keep the competition fair.
Not only the cars are being examined – the race drivers themselves are also being weighed. Because most cars are very light the weight of the driver has a large impact on the race performance. If there were no rules each team would choose the smallest and lowest drivers they could find. To keep this factor evenly balanced across the teams every car is ballasted to raise the weight of each driver to eighty kilograms. The teams do smuggle a bit with this – they choose race drivers who weigh somewhere between 70 and 75kg and just before they are weighed they drink as much water as they can hold, this way less ballast is added to the car. However, all drivers can drink just about the same amount of water so this does not give any team a large advantage.
Solar Team Twente has a short movie online in which they explain how their scrutineering went:
At the websites of the Nuon Solar Team and the Belgische Umicore team I couldn’t find anything about their scrutineerings.
[13:20] The Umicore team got their car Inspire through the scrutineering in one go:
Inspire during scrutineering
[16:20] The Nuna 5 has also passed the scrutineering. The repairs only increased the weight by 1,2kg to 161,2kg, which is really little.
Nuna 5 during scrutineering
http://twitter.com/UMSolarCarTeam Michican SolarTeam University of Michigan students designing, financing, building, and racing a solar-powered vehicle in competitions around the world. Go Fast, Go Smooth, Go Blu
http://friendfeed.com/wsc-2009
http://twitter.com/solarcar
(deze lijkt minder actueel http://twitter.com/wsolarchallenge)
http://twitter.com/Racer_D (Vreemd genoeg maar 5 followers) Nodig om Nuna hot te volgen(We vervoeren de filmcrew langs de Nuna tijdens de race.) Heeft leuke fotos MET begeleidende tekst!!!! Ik denk dat ie onderschat wordt. Alleen vandaag al twintig tweets ook met fotos
http://twitpic.com/mogqw van Michigan (zonder concentrators?)
http://twitter.com/NUsolar NUsolar is a team of 30 undergraduate students at Northwestern University dedicated to designing solar cars for use in education, outreach, and competitio
http://twitter.com/UKSolarCar We are the University of Kentucky Solar Car Team. UK Solar Car Team
Wonderful job on the solar car blogging. This, the UofMI blog, and wsctube.com helped keep me from getting too antsy while wondering what was happening during the WSC.
Years ago, the drivers were officially encouraged to tank up, and reg or associated documentation claimed it was possible to gain some crazy amount of water weight gain (20 kg?). Very odd to have regulators encouraging circumventing of rules but perhaps enforcement was considered to be troubling so they wanted to clue in teams who hadn’t considered that workaround.
Advantage still goes to the team with the smallest driver, I think. The driver compartment and even the car itself could be made smaller, so possible less material, less car volume and car weight. With a smaller driver the ballast can be strategically placed to lower center of gravity of or provide other adjustmets. There is also less driver to deal with in devising safety constraints, padding and such. Having a small driver could be of further advantage in the future if climate control becomes a requirement, since a smaller volume driver capsule or smaller mass driver would require less heating or cooling energy to maintain a given temperature. One possibility for monitoring would be through a ingestible “pill thermometer” that transmits core body temperature wirelessly – check out .
Though the regs call for 80 kg (176 lb) for the driver, I believe the minimal seating is stated to be geared to the 50th percentile adult Japanese, which is not in agreement with that 80 kg. In industry a range from the 5th percentile adult Japanese female through the 95th percentile adult American male is sometimes designed for. Even in the FSAE competition there is accommodation stature requirement for from the 5th percentile female to the 95th percentile male adult North American. Now that’s quite a range, which one fsae source has topping at about 186.7 cm (6′ 1.5″) tall, 102 kg (225 lb) and 97 cm (38.25″) sitting height plus 2″ for helmet height and I presume whatever additional helmet to roll bar clearance (if any) might be required. That’s a tall order, but is where I’d like to see solar racing go as well, using a crash test dummy or reasonable facsimile to test fitment.
I get a kick out of the teams that defy the logic of recruiting wee drivers. Team New England used a monocoque pod design in their 1995 Sunrayce car – very accommodating to larger size drivers yet the car had good performance potential – perhaps 300 miles at 50 mph on lead-acid batteries alone. However the team that really caught my surprise was Oregon State U’s, which competed in the 2008 NASC, and said all 3 drivers were over the 80kg requirement. Either the team was keen on accommodating larger drivers, crafted some nifty lead insoles, or had drivers who could drink like a camel.
-brian
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