12/21/2023 0 Comments Lightspeed champoinResolution on the test track at Millbrook In previous years, most designs have placed the driver in a pod at the back of the vehicle above the third wheel, but the rules now stipulate that cars must have four wheels and drivers must have a clear view of the road ahead. Mildon explained that the new design was partly inspired by regulation changes aimed at making competing vehicles both safer and more consumer friendly. ‘The canopy means we can have the best aerodynamic shape we can think of while still being able to track the sun.’ ‘We’ve decoupled the solar cells from the aerodynamics’ said the group’s chief engineer Peter Mildon. Rather than addressing this trade-off, the CUER team has focused its efforts on building the most aerodynamically efficient electric vehicle it could think of, and has removed its solar cells from the aerodynamic equation by placing them beneath a glass canopy and enabling them to track the sun across the sky. We’ve decoupled the solar cells from the aerodynamics Resolution’s elegant teardrop shape represents a new take on solar car designĭubbed Resolution - after the ship used by Captain Cook to circumnavigate Antarctica - the vehicle was recently flown to Australia, where it is due to compete in October’s World Solar Challenge, a gruelling four-day-long, 3,000km race across the Australian Outback from Darwin in the north to Adelaide in the south.Īn elegant teardrop-shaped vehicle, Resolution looks strikingly different to those developed by other competitors, most of whom, including four-time winner Delft University, have continued down the tried-and-tested route of exposing as much surface area as possible to the sun while optimising their vehicles’ aerodynamic shape. That is perhaps partly because of the unstable-looking ‘rolling coffee table’ design - with its expanse of solar cells, spindly wheels, and cramped driver’s compartment - that has tended to dominate the field.īut now a group of UK students from Cambridge University’s Eco Racing team (CUER) is hoping to prove that a radically different design a step closer to the type of vehicle that might one day appeal to consumers can perform just as well as, if not better than, its less aesthetically pleasing forbears. It is fair to say that the solar car, although a neat demonstrator for photovoltaic technology, hasn’t had much of an impact on the wider automotive world.
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