Team News: Durham University Solar Car team

"Here is the latest update from the Durham University Solar Car team, for regular updates of the teams progress see www.dur.ac.uk/dusc.

DUSC was drawn first for static scrutineering, alongside Stanford, and this took place yesterday morning (Wednesday). The static scrutineering process...

takes about 4 hours and includes an inspection by the road traffic authority, who issues a registration plate to allow the vehicle to be used on the road. Drivers and safety equipment carried by the support vehicles and are also part of the scrutineering process. The drivers were weighed and ballast allocated (drivers carry ballast to a weight of 80kg). The drivers demonstrated escape from the car well within the 15s limit. The car was confirmed to be compliant to regulations, subject to a re-inspection of a couple of minor points tomorrow.

Speed limits have been introduced over the whole of the Stuart Highway only relatively recently and race regulations have been progressively reducing allowed solar panel areas, to check the otherwise progressive increase in race speeds. DUSC is one of only a couple of cars running this year to have adopted the use of concentrated PV. Concentrated PV uses a large collection area (eg: parabolic mirrors) directed onto a small area of solar cells at very high intensity. Since regulations restrict cell area this allows a larger collection area and more power. However, there are some engineering challenges, such as packaging parabolic mirrors which track the sun into an aerodynamic vehicle. Also, these solar cells (manufactured by technical partner NAREC) are subjected to incident energy 10 times that of the already blistering central Australian sun.

In the afternoon the car ran practise laps at the Hidden Valley Speedway with NASC veteran driver Richard Flint in the driving seat. The car ran well, to the point that the V6 chase car struggled to keep up on some sectors of the track!"