Fresh from beating the rest of the world in part of the Formula SAE challenge, University of Western Australia students are gearing up for their next global feat.
A team of 75 students, plus UWA engineering faculty staff, are setting out to create a hydrogen-solar hybrid car capable of driving around mainland Australia under the Renewable Energy Vehicle, or REV, banner.
If successful it will be the longest journey of a hydrogen-solar hybrid, outdoing the effort by the Apollondine team from Tamagawa University in Japan, which drove from Perth to Sydney last year.
And that’s not the only challenge the UWA team has set itself. The car also has to be designed so that an average motorist could quite easily get into it and drive.
The 75 students are not all engineers. They are drawn from a number of faculties around the university, including commerce, law, medicine, computing, mathematics, and physics.
One of the team founders, Greg Dick, told those at the launch of the REV project, including State Development Minister Clive Brown and Planning and Infrastructure Minister Alannah MacTiernan, that one of the problems facing solar car designs – those featuring in the annual solar car race – was that they looked like "cockroaches on wheels".
Unlike the hybrid cars appearing on the market today, such as the Toyota Prius, the UWA car will not have a petrol and electric engine. Instead, it will use a hydrogen fuel cell as its main power source and use solar energy to drive its ancillary electrical requirements.
One of the benefits of using hydrogen as a fuel is that the waste product from its combustion is water.
Mr Dick said another key thrust of the students’ work would be to develop a cost effective and simple means of creating hydrogen from the electrolysis of water.
Hydrogen for fuel cells is currently derived from hydrocarbon products or coal – the byproducts simply adding to greenhouse gases.
The students expect to undertake their month-long around Australia journey in February 2006.
Part of the journey will involve stops at schools along the way to explain the project and demonstrate the technology they will have created.
David Bullock, another of the team’s founders, said the the car was expected to cost about $150,000 to build.
That is about half the price of the Japanese team's effort.
To raise those funds, the UWA team is looking for sponsorship and has set up a tiered sponsorship package with ‘premium sponsors’ being accepted at $20,000, ranging down to ‘diamond sponsors’ at $5,000 to $9,999.
The only higher sponsorship level than premium is naming rights sponsor, however UWA has claimed that due to the seed funding it has already put into the venture.
