Students euphoric after solar car win
UKZN mechanical engineering students are thrilled that their solar car came third internationally in the Sasol Solar Car Challenge.
A SOLAR car, designed and built by six final year mechanical engineering students at UKZN and their two supervisors, took the top position in South Africa and third place internationally in the 2014 Sasol Solar Car Challenge, which started on 27 September and ended on 4 October.
This was a great feat especially after the team lost a day and a half of the eight day race, after part of the car's electrical hardware blew just before the start-line.
“It took one-and-a-half days to repair enough of our circuitry to start the car up again. At that point, after all the other teams had already been driving in perfect sun for one and a half days, not one of us would have believed that we had a fighting chance of winning. Yet through absolute dedication and many, quite literally sleepless nights, our tight-knit team of six undergraduate students and one post-graduate continued optimising every aspect of our car, Hulamin-iKlwa, and analysed every feature of the route to improve our race strategy,” said supervisor, Clinton Bemont.
This resulted in a nail-biting last day where the car, running on about half the energy of a kitchen toaster, overtook North West University and beat them by just a few dozen kilometres on the race between Pretoria and Cape Town, to become South Africa's leading team and to take third place overall, finishing close behind the second placed team from Turkey.
“We believe that we would not have been far behind Nuon, the Dutch world champions, had we not encountered those early technical issues. And all this with one of the smallest budgets of any of the teams. The team quite literally still cannot believe that we won in SA and came third internationally. We are thrilled!” he said.
The South African Solar challenge is an officially sanctioned FIA solar car challenge. The team now has the honour of holding the current records for the longest distance travelled by a South African team in both the Challenger Class (won in 2012) and the Olympia Class (2014).
