Ohio State University Solar Team to Race Through Central Ohio
2 June 1998
Columbus, OH The Ohio State University Solar Vehicle Team will be passing through Central Ohio while competing against 5 other solar car teams in the National Road Solar Car Rally. The 386-mile Road Rally will begin June 3rd in Wheeling, West Virginia and finish on June 6th at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. The solar cars will pass near I-270 north of Columbus on their way between the two stops in Ohio which are in Norwich and Springfield.The four day race was created by the Rose-Hulman solar team in order to train new members on the off year of the 1500-mile Sunrayce competition. Every two years, 40 University and College teams compete against one another in a 10-day cross-country endurance race sponsored by General Motors, EDS and the U.S. Department of Energy. The OSU, Rose-Hulman, Purdue, Waterloo, Missouri-Rolla and Yale teams competing in this Rally were all participants in Sunrayce 97.
The Ohio State University finished 33rd in Sunrayce 95 and 18th in Sunrayce 97, and has currently begun production of their next car, The Red Shift III, for the next race. Sunrayce 99 will take the teams from Washington D.C. to the Orlando area of Florida traveling along the east coast states. "These races are a great opportunity for our engineering students to get real world, hands-on experience," said team leader Ed Kaiser. "We get to design, build and test a whole vehicle from the ground up and compete against other schools -- that's an opportunity not many undergraduates really get to see in the classroom. Team members also get to develop their communication and networking skills by talking about the benefits of solar energy to the public and to company executives."
The OSU team's current car, the Red Shift II, will also be used in the Road Rally to test new electronics systems developed since Sunrayce 97. This new system was designed to improve our energy use and performance and will be refined for use in the 1999 Red Shift III. The current car drives on state highways and can run as fast as 55 mph (a race-regulated max speed), and is able to run a little over 120 miles on its 9 lead-acid batteries alone. The Red Shift II weighs 765 pounds without a driver, 310 pounds of which is attributed to the batteries. We were regulated by Sunrayce 97 rules to use lead-acid batteries and silicon solar cells made in North America for less than $5 a Watt. Our 6 by 18 foot array produces 1.2 kilowatts on a sunny day, or enough energy to power you're average hair-dryer.
The OSU Solar Vehicle Team Center for Automotive Research 930 Kinnear Road Columbus, Ohio 43212 http://www.eng.ohio-state.edu/~solarteam sunrayce@osu.edu