New Website!

Hi Everyone,

This blog area will be going dormant very shortly. To continue following us you can visit our new website calgarysolarteam.ca (same as it has always been) and click on the blog section!


See Ya!

Tim Gamber
Electrical Engineering Manager

Work Continues...

Well since we started array construction in the shop, the team has really been shifting into high gear...

With the recent return of Scott from Switzerland the mechanical team has been revving up in preparation of the new top shell layup that will be happening mid January.


Above: Scott brought back this epic Swiss flag that is now a part of our shop...



The Mechanical team has been hard at work re-designing the suspension, brakes, roll bar, and motor on Axiom to reduce weight in all possible areas. Some components have been reduced in weight by up to a factor of 5 whilst retaining all the structural integrity required to maintain the safety of Axiom. It really sounds like we will meet our target weight loss goal of 150lbs, which will make Axiom an incredibly competitive race car.

Below: Some crazy computer madness. Jeff is at the back finalizing the design of his new Superboard and working on telemetry. John is working on the motor, Scott is working on the suspension and George is reviewing our website as it has just been updated...


Above: Computer madness...

Today was a pretty awesome day, especially because we had a visit from our Business and Sponsorship Managers, Brandon and Dan. They accomplished a fair bit of work while we were making a racket with the vacuum pump from our encapsualtor. We have been making lots of panels and are now already at 30% array completion after just 4 days of work.



Above: Our awesome solar cell encapsulation machine at work.


See Ya!

Tim Gamber
Electrical Engineering Manager

Merry X-Mas From the Solar Car Team

Hey Everyone!

We haven't updated our blog in a while so here is some random stuff we have been working on!

Construction of Axiom's new and more advanced Solar Cell Array is in progress. Right now we are roughly 20% completed after just 2 days of work. We should be finishing up in the next week or so. Our process has been much improved by various innovations in the way we make modules. The new array will be half the weight, more powerful, and much more durable compared to the previous array.

George and Denny have been building modules all day and it looks like we will hit an impressive 5 modules completed for the day.



-Above: George Re-organizing the shop, John measuring something.


-Above: George guarding the oven against solar panel robbers.


See the picture below for a glimpse of our new awesome steering wheel!



At about 1/3 the weight of the old one, it combines extremely light weight construction with greater ease of use. The drivers will now only have to deal with 5 switches instead of the previous 11. The steering wheel now houses the new Superboard designed by Jeff that takes care of all the driver controls, telemetry, and blinker lights.


The mold has also been under repair in preparation of our new top shell layup that will be happening in just a few weeks.


-Above: Mold under repair


Merry Christmas!


Tim Gamber
Electrical Engineering Manager

MPPT Update

Well exams are right around the corner (in a few days for me) and I'm putting off studying once again as per usual... so I'll update everyone with another blog post!

Kevin managed to collect a bunch of numbers on the power conversion efficiency of the MPPT last weekend. The numbers that came back look great and the real version of the tracker should be about 0.5% greater all around due to slightly different components.

Here are the graphs we managed to obtain. Output voltage in both plots is approx 110V...


The graph above is a plot of efficiency(Ordinate y-axis) vs input power(Abscissa x-axis) (boost factor is being held relatively constant at 3-5). We don't yet have enough data points to hold the boost factor constant so that's why the graph is not very smooth.



The graph above is a plot of efficiency(Ordinate y-axis) vs Boost factor(Abscissa x-axis) Input current is at roughly 5A. I think it's interesting how the top of the graph flattens out. I'm not sure yet if this is what is actually happening, or the precision of our instruments are what's causing it.

We have a lot more data at different input currents/power but we will keep that data to ourselves for now... We did actually test up to boost factors of approx 60 (<2V input)...


Anyway after exams are done we will be finally starting array construction! I can already tell you without question that this array will easily be the most risky and most innovative thing our team has ever done! This is going to take some real precision and attention to detail, hopefully we can pull it off!

See Ya!

Tim Gamber
Electrical Engineering Manager

Last Weekend and Final Exams

There was a lot of activity at the shop this past Saturday, as everyone was working hard on various tasks within each sub-team. Time is really flying by... it seems like only yesterday that the latest semester was just beginning.

Once again, I can only really speak for the mechanical team in terms of what was accomplished at the garage last week, but I'm sure Tim can fill you all in on the latest electrical-related stuff that has been going on.

The first thing we did on Saturday was dig out our prototype top shell from out of the snow in front of our shop. We left our shell outside a couple weeks ago, because we simply don't have the space to accommodate it in the garage, and after the snow dump that we experienced recently, the people working the snow plows at the grounds building apparently thought it would be a pretty funny joke to completely cover the shell in snow :P



Our seat is completely done now and pictures of both the foam/balsa core material base (which was implemented to house the bolts securing the seat to the bottom of the shell and ensure the 27 degree angle of incline) as well as the seat in its final position can be seen below.





Apart from these activities, the team was also busy with more rolling resistance testing of various tires, doing practice lay-ups in our top-shell mold, and finishing up the array stand design (it's ALMOST there... ).

Since the team watched 'Race the Sun' a couple weeks ago, we have recently made a tribute to Halle Barry's grossly simplified explanation of how a solar car works. This tribute can be seen below; note that our car only uses 99% of the energy generated, and gives back 1% to the sun in the "cycle" :) ... thanks Mico for adding that.



Didn't get too many pics of the electrical or business team this week (actually pictures of our Saturday workdays are pretty sparse lately since our camera charger magically disappeared a few weeks ago), but there will be many more pictures and updates to come as we have many important upcoming tasks scheduled. We will definitely be sure to post at least a few pictures of the eating competition between Tim and I during the teams annual Christmas potluck. We all know who's going to win that haha.

Finals are also coming up for everyone on the team, so most of the team will be on a semi-hiatus, but since we can't afford to take a break because our main lay-up is upcoming, you don't have to worry about receiving less updates from the team. On the contrary, there will be more stuff to update everyone about.

Stay tuned!

John Fernando
Mechanical Engineering Manager