Rice engineering team makes a splash at boating competition

Rice
engineering team makes a splash at boating competition

…………………………………………………………………

BY ANN LUGG
Special to the Rice News

A group of Rice
mechanical and electrical engineering undergraduates sailed
to success in a solar boat building competition this summer.

Solar Splash,
the world championship of solar and electric boating, is
an international intercollegiate competition in which entrants
design, build and competitively test manned solar-powered
boats. Now in its eighth year, the event is sponsored by
the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

The team of
six Rice students took fourth-place honors in the competition,
which concluded June 24 in Buffalo, N.Y. It was the first
time a team from Rice participated in the competition.

The Rice team’s
entry was a senior design project of mechanical and electrical
engineering students. On the team were recently graduated
mechanical engineering students Fernando Acosta, Sandra
Anuras, Tanya Hanway and Chris Tracy and electrical engineering
seniors Rajiv Bala and Ryan Hammer. With a boat designed,
built, tested and driven by the team, they picked up a list
of honors:
• first in knot tying
• first in visual display
• second in endurance
• third in qualifying round
• fifth in sprint race
• fourth place overall
• top rookie award

J.D. Wise, lecturer
in electrical engineering, and Robert Cunningham, lecturer
in mechanical engineering and coordinator for the department’s
senior design projects, advised the team.

Cunningham said
that success in the endurance competition was particularly
sweet because that phase of the contest “required good
equipment and skilled conservation of power supplied by
both batteries and solar cells. It also counted as the largest
number of points toward the final score.”

The competition
was a grueling four-hour endurance race consisting of two
two-hour races, Cunningham explained. The first test was
made up of two heats. The top performers of the two heats
met in a championship race, with the lower performers competing
in a consolation race.

“We won
our heat but were beaten in the championship race by the
winner of the other heat, an eight-year veteran,” he
said.

Some of the
competing boats had been designed and built by professionals,
such as the U. S. Coast Guard Academy’s entry, which
was designed by a naval architect, Cunningham noted. The
Rice team designed and built their boat, as well as the
power and drive systems. The hull, steering and other parts
were built from scratch, but many of the power system components
(solar cells, motor, power controller, etc.) were purchased
as complete subassemblies, which the students integrated
into their design.

Wise said, “During
the [Mechanical Engineering 407/8] course they did all the
things a design team is supposed to do: They researched
different hull configurations, built scale models of the
most promising ones and tested them in the wave tank. They
studied other teams’ boats, talked with vendors and
did good old engineering analysis to develop parameters
and establish sources for the drive train and steering.”

Cunningham had
high praise for the Rice students’ entry. “I saw
no team that matched the Rice team with a complete engineering
approach in all phases of the design and construction process.”

More information
about Solar Splash 2001 can be found at <www.solarsplash.com/>.

— Ann
Lugg is the senior department administrator for the Computer
and Information Technology Institute and editor for the
office of the dean of engineering.