Sunswift 3
Sunswift 3 was the culmination of all of the ideas that we’d had over the past few races. Tim Wardrop did a lot of the mechanical engineering behind it. I was the chief electrical guy, but had a lot to do with the mechanical ideas. Between the two of us, we designed most of the car (although there were a lot of other people doing lots of the detailed work, and building it).
My main contributions to the project were:
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•Guiding technical discussions, organising meetings, general butt-kicker.
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•Array design and implementation
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•CFD simulations (with Sam and Tim) - also needs its own page. We ran some of the biggest models in Australia at the time (15 milion elements) over a three month period on the laboratory computers in CSE. We ran about 100 models during that time, which allowed us to optimise a number of aspects of the car’s aerodynamic design as well as confirm various intuitions. I was also suggested a bunch of the ideas that ended up in the shape. The car’s excellent aerodynamic performance (a CdA of 0.11 for a 2 seat solar car) is exceptional.
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•Structural spat design (with Tim) and manufacture (these really need a page to themselves - they are a very complex carbon fibre part that is manufactured in one piece and comes out of the mould with ready-to-go aero surfaces. They take the driving, braking, cornering, etc, loads). This included the way in which the wheels are mounted inside the spats.
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•Various mechanical ideas for the structure: kick-boards, fillets and sealing system, bulkhead sealing system.
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•The steering system (which failed during the pre-WSC testing, but not because of the overall design, as was proven by the team in the trans-continental attempt).
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•General car wiring
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•Battery monitoring system (with Scotty)
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•Battery pack selection and design.
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•MPPT selection, implementation.
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•Tyre pressure monitoring
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•Various random sensors (GPS, current, temperature, etc, etc)
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•Strategy and telemetry software and data management (scandalhub)
Saturday, 1 January 2005