Our ChapterChem-E Car Team
Current Co-Chairs: David Chung & Erik Lee | Location: BH 5764 | Meetings: Tuesdays and Thursdays 10-12am | E-mail: uclachemecar@gmail.com | Live Journal
Introduction
The Goal: To build a shoe-boxed size car and compete against other universities at the National and Regional AIChE conferences.
How You Can Help: Come to the meetings! Please email uclachemecar@gmail to get on the emailing list.
Competition Guidelines: The Chem-E-Car must go between 50-100 feet carrying a 0-500 milliliter water load within 2 minutes. The actual distance and load is not declared until an hour before competition; we must calibrate our car so that it stops at that certain distance. The winner is the car that is closest to the declared distance. Precision counts!
Check out the Nationals Poster.
Project Progress
The Bruin Car
Our fuel-cell-powered-car, nicknamed the 'Bruin Car', has improved significantly in the last year. The main change to our car was the addition of an iodine-clock stopping mechanism to improve the reliability of our calibrations. The iodine clock reaction is a color changing reaction, turning dark after a certain time. We used that in conjunction with a light sensor electrically connected to a relay. When the reaction turns dark, the relay turns off the flow of electricity, thereby stopping the car.
The Other Car
Over the past school year, we have also started designing and building a second car. We are still exploring different reactions focused on either generating high pressure or electricity. We have constructed a lightweight chassis for the second car and will continue to research powering mechanisms for our second car.
See pictures of Chem-E-Car in the making
See pictures from the 2008-2009 AIChE Team
Competition Results:
We attended two competitions in the 2008-2009 school year.
* We were not able to compete in the National Competition on November 15-16, 2008 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania due to a shipping problem.
* At the Regional Conference on April 3-4, 2009 at UC Davis, we placed 2nd out of 7 teams at the performance competition. We also won the Spirit of Competition Award as the most spirited school. We've secured participation in the National Conference this November 7-8, 2009 by placing within the top three teams of the Regional competition.
Faculty Involvement
Professor Gerassimos Orkoulas is the AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers) UCLA advisor and he contributes his knowledge and advice to the team.
Dr. James Drake is the undergraduate laboratory instructor in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department, and he volunteers his laboratory for the UCLA Chem-E Car team to use for designing, building, and testing. While supervising the team, Dr. Drake shares his vast amount of engineering wisdom and gives us valuable advice.
Contact Us
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to email current co-chairs, Erik Lee and David Chung.