I am writing to inform you of some changes in the
organization of the Solar Phantom Team.
As a team, with the backing of the Institute, we have
decided not to participate in any future solar car races.
There are many reasons that this decision was reached, some
of which are under our control and others that are not.
What it really comes down to is that today’s solar car
competitions are less about quality engineering than spending.
Over the past thirteen years this team has come a long way
in terms of aerodynamics and energy efficiency.
The most significant improvement that could be made to our
current solar car would be to purchase an extremely expensive and
efficient solar array. Making
that improvement would allow us to be very competitive but at the
sacrifice of some of our ideals.
Ideals like putting the time and effort into designing and
building a more energy efficient car would be overshadowed by the
incredible increase in available power from a more efficient solar
array.
As a result of this, we have decided to form
a new organization, the Alternative Energy Vehicle Team.
This team will absorb the current Solar Phantom Team while
creating an entirely new team that pursues similar goals.
A lot of knowledge about how to engineer a solar car has
been built up over the last decade.
We want to use and transfer all of that knowledge to a
different application. Our
ultimate goal is to find an innovative competition, which
encompasses all of the complexity and challenges of building a
solar car, where progress hasn’t hit a plateau.
We are currently trying to raise interest in the student
body for a land speed project.
The idea would be to build a fully electric vehicle for the
purposes of breaking the current land speed record.
The current record is only around 132 mph, which we feel is
a very attainable mark.
We will be working on the design and
construction of this vehicle over the next several months.
We are also in the planning stages of making a test-bed out
of the current solar car for work with power trackers and possibly
even fuel cells. We
are very excited about this opportunity. We hope that you too are excited about the possibilities that
the future holds for the Alternative Energy Vehicle Team and will
continue to support this team and the Rose-Hulman community in all
of its endeavors.
