After the move in date the current solar car building is going to be demolished and will be used as a construction yard.

Here’s the tentative floor plan for the new building:

If any alumni feel like donating money or know somebody that wants to have a building named after them, now is the time. We currently have 2600 sq ft to ourselves in the shop and when we get into the new building we will have one bay. The seminar room and the simulator room are custom additions for the teams that are bringing lots of money to the construction of the building. While we’re bringing a fair amount of county approved for use land space (GUP) to the new building, that does not seem to factor in to the size that is allocated for us.

If this space proves to be as inadequate as expected, the team will be forced to rent an off-campus facility.

Enpalo, a startup founded by some of our student peers here at Stanford has offered to calculate our carbon footprint and offset it with gold standard certified carbon credits that go towards the R&D and implementation of renewable energy systems. While this does not have a direct effect on our own operations, at least we get to feel better knowing that somebody is looking out for our own carbon footprint.

So I guess that means that under some loose definition of the term, the Stanford Solar Car Project is now a carbon neutral organization.

The array was encapsulated by Hans Gochermann out in Germany using a proprietary technique that creates a micropyramidal structure in the top surface. Ostensibly the micropyramids help to capture more light by limiting reflection. Incident light is capture by total internal reflection within the surface and the hopefully eventually hits the solar cell underneath. The other purpose of encapsulation is to protect the cell from the elements and make them less fragile during installation.

In using the our array, we found its mechanical properties to be absolutely fantastic. The fiberglass composite panel is designed to bend just like the solar cell and do a good job of distributing point loads. It did that marvelously well and you could bend the modules almost as much as you can bend a thin film array.

The part that I’ve always been more dubious about is the micropyramids. My gut instinct told me that those pyramids probably only do the job that they’re supposed to do right after fabrication and that afterwards they fill with dirt and are more or less useless. Part of that instinct later turned in to an educated guess when we found that we cannot wipe the surface of the array and that instead would could only clean it by using sheets of tape on the surface, carefully peeled away to capture dirt particles.

Once the cells were on the SEM it became obvious that dirt was a serious problem. The samples that we looked at had been cleaned by the tape method in the middle and not cleaned on the outsides. The macroscopic dirt had mostly fallen off while we were preparing the sample, but the microscopic dirt remained even after the taping. Furthermore, the tape even left small dots of residue. We managed to find some clean pyramids (but we had to look really hard for them) so we can show you what they look like. Most of the sample had only the very peaks of the pyramids showing through the dirt.

Apparently a high school team from New York and the Stanford team will be on the show. We’ll be sure to try and get lots of pictures to put up here after the event, and we’ll be sure to keep everyone updated on when the show will air.

The network is supposed to reach 50 million viewers, and this show is supposed to be one that is on the premiere launch lineup.

Later Ian Dimen, who made most of the electrical system in Solstice, came back and helped us get the car to power up again. All that remains is to electrically connect the motor and motor controller and we should be able to drive Solstice again.

Thanks especially to the alumni that came out to help us get Solstice running again!

Visit our new media gallery to check out some never before seen pictures from our recent adventure at the World Solar Challenge in Australia.

Media Gallery

To try and find that out, we have already used an infrared thermal imaging system to look at the array in daylight to see where power was going within the array. Thanks to Gene during his stay with Tesla Motors for letting us make use of that equipment. At that time we marked the cells that looked off kilter with electrical tape.

Now we’re going back and turning on the individual array modules with a power supply, effectively turning them into LEDs to try and see any defects. We’re not sure yet how to interpret what we see, but we’re working on it.

Check it out:

David Li and crew have been doing excellent work putting together the base of the oven. It is very strong to support the full weight of our molds, and also sufficiently open to allow us to route our resistive heating wires. This will be the first large oven electric oven that we’ve built. All of our previous ovens have been gas powered. The switch is mostly motivated by the desire for more carefully controlled temperature profiles and better temperature uniformity. It will be rated for about 15 kW

The new oven will also be designed to stay outdoors, thus saving us a lot of shop space as it will hold the molds while we aren’t using them. It will also be on wheels so it can more easily travel with us when we move to our new facility in a little over a year.

The seating design was based on Army aggregate data on incoming recruits as they got their uniforms made. One of the first things we discovered was that Army personnel seem to be a little bit wider than we are, so the seat is going to be at least four inches narrower than what you see here.

We will soon be modifying the mockup to include a first pass at a roll cage and the driver interfaces. This will let us see if everything is in a reasonably ergonomic position while still allowing the fast egress times we need to pass scrutineering.