Antelope Valley College Shell Eco-Marathon Group
Shell Eco-Marathon Group was created to do two things build a car and build our resumes.
After my time end with the Solar Falcon Race Team, I started to desire more. My community college class weren’t fore-filling me anymore. I felt like I was getting stagnant. This was when I created the Shell Eco-Marathon group within Antelope Valley’s STEM club. The group was created to build a vehicle for the Shell Eco-Marathon Competition (info below). More importantly, I saw a need for this at my community college. After being a part of the Solar Falcon Race Team, I saw the benefit of engineering and building a vehicle to race. I saw how the Solar Falcon Race Team changed my and my teammate’s lives. One of my teammates ended up getting a full-ride scholarship to the University of Michigan from one of our sponsors. Many others ended up getting jobs/internships at companies like Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, The Spaceship Company, and PFMG Solar. I want to recreate these opportunities for my fellow community college students. Who tend to be forgotten when it comes to internships for engineering students due to the requirement to be at a four-year university.
What is the Shell Eco-Marathon?
It is a global competition held yearly by Shell gas company for high school and college students to build hyper-mileage vehicles. The goal of the competition to see who’s vehicle will have the highest energy efficiency.
Check out this video by Shell’s YouTube channel about the competition
The Team & Plan
After founding the group within the AVC Stem Club in the spring semester of 2018, I was tasked with recruiting the necessary people to get this project moving forward and into something physical. By that summer of 2018, we had the workings of a solid team. I structured the team with 3 permanent groups, Electrical, Suspension/Drive-train, and Chassis/Body Team. Each with its respected lead and co-lead. Our goal for the team was to have a working prototype class battery-electric car compete in the 2019 Shell Eco-Marathon held at Sonoma Raceway in April. Our rough schedule was.
Organize and Collection of Resources - Summer 2018
Design & Procurement of Parts - Fall 2018
Construction of Vehicle - Winter 2018
Testing - Spring 2019
Transport & Race - April 2019
My Role
As Lead of Design & Management/Electrical Lead, I oversaw all aspects of the program, from significant design decisions to scheduling. This involved me unitizing Microsoft Projects to build a detailed schedule to keep us on track for our 2019 goal. I was not just an over-titled manager. My experience with the Solar Falcon Race prepared me for many of the problems I would face over the course of this project. At the end of the day, if the task was not complete, it was my job to pick up the slack. Also, as the Electrical Lead, I had to oversee a subset of the group. I had the unique task of teaching my electrical team members everything there is to know about electric vehicles and their electrical systems. Many of my electrical team members just had basic electrical system design knowledge, as many just completed their physics course on electricity and magnetism. Within the time I had them, I had to get them fully up to speed to design a motor controller as it was a requirement to design and build our own by the competition.
Project Schedule completed using Microsoft Projects
Basic Electrical System Schematic
This is the Basic Electrical schematic that was completed by the electrical team under my advisement. We planned on using a Brushless DC Motor with a custom-made motor controller. We were actually mentored by a University of Duke Ph.D. Candidate on the design of Shell Eco-Marathon vehicles, but more importantly, the design of our motor controller. Also including in this schematic are a horn, joule meter, emergency cut-offs, and a BMS. The competition requires the joule meter to record how much energy we consume to determine how efficient our vehicle is. The competition rules require the BMS or Battery Management System to manage our battery pack to prevent failure by disconnecting the battery pack from the system. The BMS protects from cell level over-discharge, cell level over-current, and exceeding the cell’s maximum operating temperature.
Preparing our Solidworks designed 3D plug made out of Styrofoam and fiberglass layup to create our mold
What happen in the end…
On February 11, 2019, after realizing the electrical team would not complete a working motor controller by the time of the race, the team group leads and I decided to redesign our vehicle for an ICE-based system, ICE(internal combustion engine). As we believe we would be able to complete the redesign by the time of the race in April of 2019. After spending a grueling weekend with the team redesigning the car’s propulsion system and rear-end to fit an ICE system. We show up the following Wednesday, February 13, to prepare the plugs for wet lay-up to create the mold. We get news from our faculty advisor that our grant money is getting audited and that our funding would be on hold indefinitely, thus ending the project.
After realizing without the financial support from the college, we would not be complete the vehicle in time for the 2019 Shell Eco-Marathon, not even including the cost of travel to the race.
Luckily, we purchased all the materials needed to build our vehicle’s shell with the money we had before the audit. Over the course of Spring Break (April 1 - 5), we finished preparing the plug and decided to move forward with a fiber-glass layup. We were moved to a different room for this process due to our previous room with independent AC being in current use. We moved to a large building for this process. At the time, our faculty advisor did not know that this building had a connected AC system. Thus when we started the layup process, the fumes spread to the entire building; luckily, no one was there. After a professor assistant report this, we had to move our molds outside, which spend up our cure time substantially due to the change in temperature and humidity. This resulted in our molds being a complete failure. Some broke in the removal process, and the others lacked the structural rigidity needed to be held under vacuum for our carbon fiber resin fusion.