What is ChemE Car?
ChemE Car Project is a club at UC San Diego which focuses on creating a car for the competition, held by AICHE every year on regional and national level. Students have to design and build a small car which is propelled and stopped using solely chemical reactions. The reactions should be controlled in order to make the car stop at a certain distance. During the competition the judges announce the distance and the load that should be carried one hour before the first run. The car that stops the closest to the distance announced becomes the winner of the competition.
My role
I have been involved in this project for two years now and I am very passionate about this engineering challenge. This year I was elected to be the Vice-President Internal for this project: I have to organize meetings, communicate with professors and create a time line for the project. Below is the timeline that shows the overview of the typical task flow during the year at UC San Diego ChemE Car:
Past Battery Propulsion Car
Furthermore, my role in the project is not only organizational. In the 2014-2015 academic year, I worked on a car powdered by a zinc-air battery called ‘Pink Panther’. Zinc-air battery generates current by electron flow from cathode to anode through the electrolyte in order to power the motor.
The car was chosen to go to Regionals and came in fourth place in the competition. The pictures of the car and the poster are shown below(click to enlarge):
Past Pressure Propulsion Car
In addition, this Fall I joined a team that is working on the car powdered by a pressure system called ‘Great Gassby’. This car came in 3rd place at Regionals; therefore it qualified to go to Nationals. The pictures of the car and the poster are shown below:
This was the first time UC San Diego ChemE Car team obtained qualification for the Nationals! The page dedicated to our Nationals journey is situated here.
Current Progress
This academic year, ChemE Car at UC San Diego has seven teams working on both stopping and propulsion mechanisms to prepare two cars for the Regional competition at Riverside on April 15th, 2016. We are currently at our Chemical Testing Stage and at the moment we have a wide range of systems being tested from Magnesium Battery Propulsion to Spring Stopping and from Thermoelectric propulsion to Concentration Gradient Stopping. I hope many of those systems succeed and we will have another great year for ChemE Car Project at UC San Diego.
Vera Smirnova 