Engineering Experience - Building a Small Solar Vehicle

Student projects have become an important part of most modern engineering curricula, to provide students with actual engineering experience. At Group T, International University College Leuven in Belgium, we support this philosophy wholeheartedly by organising increasingly complex student projects throughout the three bachelor years. The central theme of the project in the second year, Engineering Experience 4, is "Make stuff work". Different teams of students design and build a ‘Small Solar Vehicle’ (SSV). The learning goals of the project are model based design, simulation, optimisation and environmental awareness by measuring and implementing solar panels. The teams of students work as an engineering office that presents a solution to a problem. For the construction of the SSV the teams each receive a panel with solar cells and a DC-motor. They have to take the correct decisions concerning frame, orientation of the panel, gear ratio. The Vehicle is also subjected to a number of tests and its behaviour is predicted, at first using manual calculations; later using simulation software. The team performs a critical analysis on the SSV. The analysis is carried out in the following fields: aerodynamics, dynamics, strength of materials, material science, mathematics and energy. The behaviour of the SSV model must be predicted and optimised and studied on an energetic level by composing Sankey diagrams at different working points. In the end, every SSV will take part in an actual solar race, where the teams compete against each other on a predefined track. Moreover, additional grades can be gained for the most innovative and most beautiful vehicles.status: accepte