UNM engineering students made waves last week in the Solar Splash championships, an international solar competition which took place in Dayton, Ohio.
UNM’s team, comprised of seven senior mechanical engineering students and one electrical engineering master student, and guided by mechanical engineering professor Peter Vorobieff, was founded this year and took fourth place overall in the competition over Father’s Day weekend.
The UNM Solar Splash team was clearly the strongest rookie squad in the competition. With a budget far less than the sums spent by veteran teams, UNM not only took fourth place overall, it also won second place in Solar Slalom, was named Best Rookie Team and took home the Sportsmanship Award for willingness to help others.
The team was formed officially by Lucca Henrion and Griffin Cearley, with a sponsorship from Sandia National Laboratories.
Cearley said he and Henrion were first approached about participating after starting the UNM student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in fall 2015.
Cearley said after he and Henrion were contacted by Solar Splash, they had to work with the UNM mechanical engineering department to get the solar boat competition approved as their senior capstone design project. Once approved, they were ready to start working.
A simple design was key to success, as their budget and time constraints did not allow for all the bells and whistles other teams had, Cearley said. For the team of students, their hard work and economical use of funds allowed them to succeed last week at Solar Splash 2016.
“My favorite part of the project was definitely seeing our hard work pay off at competition; seeing us pulling ahead on the scoreboard of some of the seasoned teams was exhilarating. It really speaks to the simplicity of our design, something hopefully future teams can maintain despite having much longer to work on the craft,” Cearley said.
Cearley, Henrion and Vorobieff have paved the way for future solar boating participation at UNM in the years to come. Although both Cearley and Henrion have gone on to graduate and are both attending doctoral programs at the University of Michigan, they said they intend to be advisors for next year’s team.
“Competitions like these allow students to pursue projects that are a bit unorthodox. We were lucky enough to spend our capstone senior design project building a solar powered boat, as opposed to working on some of the more typical projects,” Cearley said.
Although the 2016 Solar Splash was a success for UNM, Cearley said he has plenty of advice to offer next year’s team to better compete with the top three teams.
His recommendations include redesign of a sleeker hull for less drag, a custom-built motor controller as “the factory-programmed controller didn’t allow our fullest performance,” he said, and a maximum power point tracker “to optimize energy being drawn from the panels for various sunlight conditions.”
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“Our performance in the endurance race is what we should improve most for next year,” he said.
Above all else, the Solar Splash competition was a place for UNM students to make new friends, network and display their intellectual prowess, while maintaining an image of inclusiveness and sportsmanship.
