The Solar Car that Raced to the Starting Line

U of Toronto’s team took only 13 months to design and build

Students from the University of Toronto’s Blue Sky Solar Car team have announced their new car, the B-7. Amazingly, the 50 student team only started designing the car 13 months ago.

The car is competing in the 2013 World Solar Challenge (WSC). The race through Australia will last 8 days (ending October 13th) and 3021 km (1877 mile). 42 competitors from 24 countries will be competing.

 

Image courtesy of Blue Sky Solar Racing.

New WSC design constraints stipulate that cars require a four wheel configuration and an upright driver. This will inevitably increase the drag and introduce new challenges in design.

In the past, designing cars for this competition has taken competitors up to 4 years. The increase of difficulty coupled with the expedience of the design and production shows the commitment and ingenuity of the Blue Sky team.

The Blue Sky team’s secret was Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE. Dassault Systèmes’ products are well-known for 3D digital Mock Up, 3D design, and Product Lifecycle Management. The design and simulation systems simplify the process via consolidation. Within the 3DEXPERIENCE program electrical, mechanical and aerodynamics can all be simulated through one interface. This makes for easy and effective teamwork and design.

Blue Sky’s B-7 does look impressive. Time will tell whether the B-7 is as fast to the finish line as the Blue Sky team was in getting it to the start.

 

Written by

Shawn Wasserman

For over 10 years, Shawn Wasserman has informed, inspired and engaged the engineering community through online content. As a senior writer at WTWH media, he produces branded content to help engineers streamline their operations via new tools, technologies and software. While a senior editor at Engineering.com, Shawn wrote stories about CAE, simulation, PLM, CAD, IoT, AI and more. During his time as the blog manager at Ansys, Shawn produced content featuring stories, tips, tricks and interesting use cases for CAE technologies. Shawn holds a master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Guelph and an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.