The Dartmouth Formula Racing team will go head-to-head with teams from around the world in the fourth annual Formula Hybrid International Competition held at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon this week. Teams from Yale University, Tufts University and McGill University will race alongside cars from India, Italy, Russia and Taiwan in the three-day event hosted by the Thayer School of Engineering that challenges competitors to design, build and race fuel-efficient race cars.
The event began Monday with 30 registered teams competing in both "static events" like design and marketing presentations as well as "dynamic events," including acceleration tests and a 22-km endurance event, according to Thayer research engineer Doug Fraser, who directs the Formula Hybrid Project with Wynne Washburn.
In this year's competition, the maximum amount of gasoline allowed for each car was reduced from last year's 4.7 liters to 2.3 liters in the 22-km endurance event, Fraser said.
The reduction in fuel allowance was both a response to the fact that all of last year's teams had an excess of gasoline and a challenge for the engineers to increase their race cars' fuel efficiency, Fraser said. While the amount of fuel that each car used was not recorded in previous years, fuel use will be documented this year, he added.
The design quality of the cars has improved noticeably since last year's competition, Fraser added. Nearly half of the teams have taken part in the competition for three years and have learned from their previous experiences, he said.
Of the 15 students on the Thayer team, 10 were enrolled in a two-term engineering class in which they designed and built parts of the race car, according to Ben Sampson '08, a graduate student at Thayer and the team's co-captain.
All of the team's members are students at Thayer, according to Amanda Perry, an administrative assistant to Thayer professor John Collier, who is the team's adviser.
Both Sampson and co-captain Erik Bell '08, also a graduate student at Thayer, were on the Thayer Formula Hybrid team last year. They began developing the basic design of the car last summer, Sampson said.
The team tried to improve its car from previous years to make it more simple, reliable and durable, Sampson said.
Specifically, one of the parts the team sought to improve was the brake system, because race cars typically lose much of their energy to heat created by braking, according to Sampson.
"We focused on regenerative braking so that we could actually gain energy from braking," he said.
To improve the fuel efficiency of this year's car, the Thayer team reduced the car's weight by approximately 60 pounds, primarily by adjusting the drive train, which includes the engine and generator, Sampson said.
"We tried to lower the part count as much as we could, so we removed components from the car that were under-performing or deemed unnecessary," he said.
The Thayer team's race car experienced a failure during a drive on Saturday, so the team has had to spend a few hours installing a new sensor for the motor before the car's technical inspection on Tuesday.
"The biggest key to our team's success is getting our car done early and being able to test it," Sampson said.
Last year, the Thayer team placed seventh overall and second in the design portion of the competition out of 32 competitors, according to Sampson.
