Thanks to everyone who donated during our last round of fundraising this fall! There have been some delays which held up the last set of donations, but now we are receiving your generous contributions. Our great sponsors helped to get our team to the World Solar Challenge, and the race was an extraordinarily valuable learning experience for our team. Here are some of those donors.

In Kind Donations:

SynQor is a leading supplier of power conversion solutions to the communications, computing and industrial markets. SynQor’s innovative products are designed to exceed the demanding performance, quality, and reliability requirements of today’s power electronic engineers that are developing leading-edge infrastructure hardware. SynQor’s capabilities include both standard and custom solutions for distributed power architectures. SynQor provided our team with a set of prototype power converters. They moved mountains to help us out at the last minute before our race and even overnighted the converters to us. We appreciate their help.

Friends Level Sponsors:

Adopt a Panel Level Sponsors:

Henry and Margy Dudley

The Hsu Family

Other Sponsors:

Justy Burdick

Eric Ellenoff

Richard Gaughan

Thomas Sachson

If you have contributed to our team but have not seen your name or company on our website please let us know. It is likely that your gift is still held up in the delay, and we want to ensure that recognize all of our sponsors.

Our team has already started organizing and brainstorming for our next car. We plan to take many of the principles and technologies that we developed with Xenith to build an even faster and more refined car. As always, our team will be reaching out to get help with our project. We are looking for everything from wind tunnel access to in kind part donations to cash sponsorships to industry mentors.

Our next design, build, and race cycle will start at the beginning of the new year. All Stanford students are welcome to join our exciting project. We are a multidisciplinary team with engineering, science, and humanities majors. Email contactsolarcar@lists.stanford.edu if you want information about our first meetings in 2012. We would love to have you on our team.

There will be some exciting new changes to our project in the upcoming two years, so check back often to follow our progress!

The Stanford Solar Car Project is recruiting new members for our next build cycle. We are a team that designs, builds, and races solar powered race cars. If you are an engineer, an entrepreneur, a scientist, a designer, a hacker, a businessperson, a coder, or any other Stanford student you need to join this group. The Stanford Solar Car Project will give you the hands on engineering and business experience that you have been missing in your classes, and you will have a ton of fun while learning a lot.

If you are ready to join here is what you need to do:

• Come to our new member meeting on Saturday the 14th at Noon. If you miss the first meeting just come to the next meeting on Mondays at 7:30pm or on Saturdays at noon. We meet at the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab on the west side of campus. Here is a map.
• Join our mailing list here.
• If you want to get in touch with us you can email us at contactsolarcar@lists.stanford.edu
• Bookmark our website at solarcar.stanford.edu
• Fill out this survey at goo.gl/LslGO

The team just returned from an epic 3000km race across the Australian Outback called the World Solar Challenge. We are currently planning for the 2013 race, so now is the best time to join. We will be designing our next car from now until the summer and we will start building our next car during the 2012-2013 school year. Solar Car could be the highlight of your Stanford experience, so browse through our website to see what you have been missing.

To all SSCP Alumni:

Our team recently returned from the 2011 World Solar Challenge. We built an ambitious and exciting car named Xenith, and now we are preparing to design and build an even more competitive car for the 2013 WSC. Our team is good at creating bold designs, and now we are reorganizing our team to ensure that our designs are more robust and well tested.

We want to have more thorough design reviews while we build and test our next car, so we are building a network of Stanford alumni and

other professionals who can mentor our group. All of you have built solar cars already, so we want your advice. A strong alumni network will allow us to pass down knowledge and to prevent future teams from making the same mistakes that past teams have made. We would like to create a directory of existing alumni to start the network, so we have a quick survey for you to fill out. We would like to ask some of you to offer your wisdom when our members need help solving especially complex design problems and when projects are ready to receive a professional design review. You can indicate in the survey if you are too busy to help with design reviews, but we would always like to have you on our directory so that we can keep you in the loop. We hope to invite you to new car unveilings, to help you connect with other alumni, and to send you a quick update newsletter when we reach major milestones.

This link, http://goo.gl/UqqDF, will take you to a site to sign up for our network. If you have contact information for other SSCP alumni, please forward them this message. We want to include as many alumni on our directory as possible.

Please let us know if you have any other ideas for how everyone can benefit from this network. We could do anything from alumni reunion BBQs to a job posting bulletin board.

Hi all,

We haven’t had any new pictures lately, so I wanted to post a few shots for everyone who has been following us. All I had was an iPhone, but it seems like the majority of our team had dSLR cameras. Hopefully some beautiful shots will show up on our website and Flickr account soon when other members have time to upload pictures. Thanks for everyone’s support during WSC!

Xenith at Hidden Valley Raceway

Our race trailer and all of our great sponsors

Xenith before scrutineering

Xenith and some of our competitors during scrutineering

Prepping Xenith for the start of the race in Darwin-one of the observers that drove and camped with us is on the right

Nathan’s parents cooked for us every night during the race. The meals were delicious.

Our team at the end of one of the race days. This was a night when we were fortunate enough to stop near a camper van park.

Here we stopped and camped on the side of the road

Our topshell at the end of a day of racing and our team’s umpteenth blue Powerade

Caravan!

Stopped at a control point. At all control points we had the chance to charge for a bit, swap drivers, and check tires.

Xenith and the team before the ceremonial finish of the race in Adelaide

Busing to the finish in Adelaide

Victoria square waterfountain

The Woolshed

After the race, we drove along to Great Ocean Road on our way back to the port in Melbourne. Here was a three story lobster statue.

The collapsed London Arch

One of the beaches along the Great Ocean Road

The Great Ocean Road was by far the most scenic part of our entire trip. We had rolling hills, dense forests, and an impressive coastline to keep us company for three days while we made our way back to Melbourne.

Eventually we had to repack all of our belongings to send back to the US.

With Xenith packed away for another ocean voyage, our team is splitting up for our various trips. Some of us have already flown back to the US to resume classes at Stanford. Others are traveling abroad until the start of the winter quarter. We will have people in Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Japan, the Philippines and more. Check out some of our travel blogs including solarlizard.blogspot.com

[Sorry for the delay in getting this post up - we've been driving through the country the past several days, trying to find internet after two of our internet modems disappeared and the other failed.]

Well, the 2011 World Solar Challenge is over.

It was one of the most interesting races in recent memory. While the event usually enjoys nearly perfect sunshine, this year the outback decided to give us high winds, huge brushfires, persistent high altitude clouds, large intermittent cloud banks, and in the driest state of the driest country on the planet, rain. The conditions made the job of our race strategist the the least desirable role of any in our race team. In short, conditions were not ideal for racing solar cars.

As you may have gathered from the provisional race results, we did not finish the entire course. Only 7 out of 37 teams teams traveled the entire distance under solar power, a much lesser proportion than the sunny 2009 race, which saw 10 out of 25 teams finish under their own power.

As of day 5, our second to last day on the road, our strategy had us rolling into Adelaide in the morning of day 6, based on (as it turned out) the overly optimistic weather report. Unfortunately, the weather turned to be absolutely terrible – or the last day and a half of the race leading up to the hard deadline of noon on day 7, nearly all of South Australia was under a huge front of clouds and rain – which means we produced very little power from our array. Our array is more efficient at producing power than anyone else in the race, but at that point it made little difference.

The top three teams, Tokai, Nuon, and Michigan, finished the race in that order, coming in under the last rays of sunshine. No one else was successful in outrunning the cloud front that settled over the area. This left many teams, including us, with the dismal outlook of having nearly empty battery packs, while our solar arrays produced only minimal power. Until late on the last day of timing, it was unclear whether many more teams would actually manage to finish the race. Only the top seven had enough energy left in their packs to cruise to the finish line, at no faster than 30kph.

The last day of the race for us was hard on everyone. We knew we were in bad shape the evening before, when we failed to get any significant amount of array stand charging in due to cloud cover. Despite a forcast for clearer skies, the morning failed to produce much more power – only about 200W from the array. Close to midday, we managed to get the car on the road and start chugging along out of Glendambo at less than 30kph on the dismal amount of power the cloud cover was allowing us to produce. We had a small glimmer of hope that if we could maintain this speed, it might be enough to finish the race in time for the hard deadline in about 28 hours.We fought, very slowly, through many long, gradual hills and some light rain, but at some point we pulled over after we had been reduced to traveling at about 15kph and the battery pack had tripped for low voltage for the umpteenth time. We crunched some numbers, and even assuming that day 7 was all sun, we would not have been able to finish the race. This was the point where the team gathered, and after some quiet introspection, made the crushingly difficult decision to put the car in the trailer and continue to Adelaide. We packed up, got in the cars, and drove quietly over the last 400 kilometers of the race route.

On Saturday morning, we ceremonially rolled across the finish line, and with no less cheer than everyone else, celebrated the end of the race by soaking ourselves in the fountain – several of us even got thrown in by other teams as they rolled across the finish line.

According to the race officials’ calculation, our final placement was 11th overall. We finished 4th in the Production Class, which is generally equal to any team not using Michelin tires. This result, while not terrible, is not what we were hoping and dreaming would come of this car. It’s been especially hard for the many team members who have put immense amounts of time and effort into building this car from the ground up with their own minds and hands. Now it’s time for the team to step back, analyze what went right and what went wrong, confront the problems that arose from new perspectives with new solutions. This car may not have performed to our best informed expectations, but this team is not defeated. To quote the unofficial motto of the Stanford Solar Car Project – ever onwards.

We’ll try to upload photos from the race to our flickr account and to this post as soon as possible.

Schwalbe has generously provided us with a set of Energizer S tires. Specially designed for solar cars, these tires give us reduced rolling resistance and are allowing us to drive across the Outback faster. Schwalbe is a German designer of quality bicycle and moped tires. Thank you!

We’d also like to thank HS Bochum, the German solar car team, which helped develop the tires and handled shipping. They’re currently racing Solarworld GT. They’ve been extremely gracious and helpful to us and many other solar car teams as we prepared in Darwin.

 

Good morning from the third day of the race. Here’s an update on how things are going and a recap of the first two days.

Day One: We got off to a fast start off the line. We started seventh out of about 40 teams, and climbed to 5th by passing Twente and Sunswift, who broke down and took a wrong turn respectively. Unfortunately, about 200 km out of Darwin, we had a relatively routine tire change. In the rush of putting the motor back in the car after we seated the new tire, we accidentally damaged a mechanical component that held the axle of the motor from spinning. This means the motor’s stator spun freely when we accelerated, damaging the wiring of the motor. Luckily, we were able to fix the issue, but we lost two hours on the side of the road in the process. We got back on the road after this and made it to Dunmarra for the night.

Day Two: Things went significantly more smoothly yesterday. We ran into a few obstacles over the course of the day, including a large cloud of smoke from a controlled brushfire, as well as some high-altitude clouds which messed with our insolation. Our motor had some hall-effect sensor issues at low speeds remaining from the first day, but they didn’t prevent the car from moving at high speed, as the motor no longer uses these sensors. We still experienced a higher than expected power draw from the car, and much of the team was in a resigned mood and at a loss for where our power was dissapearing to. On the bright side, our array is working brilliantly, and we estimate we’re producing about 10% more array power than any of the leading teams. We stopped for the night in Tennant Creek, where Paul and Sasha stayed up all night and completely repaired the motor.

Now, the current situation. The race has been stopped about 116km south of our current position, due to a huge brushfire that completely decimated the town of Barrow Creek and the surrounding area. Teams were stopped at Tennant Creek as they arrived yesterday. The fire cleared enough to restart the race this morning, and the teams are setting off according to the timing in which they arrived. This puts us at a departure time of 11:57 am. This is a blessing and a curse for us, strategy wise – if we had known that this would be the situation at Tennant Creek, we would have driven faster yesterday to improve our position in the race, since we would have time to charge this morning. In our current situation, our state of charge is better, our time is worse, but we get even more time to charge on the array stand as we approach solar noon. It’s very complicated to find the balance that gives us a net benefit, but it works out to be close enough to even either way.

We’ll be taking off from here soon with a full battery pack, so we can hopefully improve our position somewhat going forward. We’ll keep you updated as we pass internet access points.