The team included, from left, Trevor Goldman, Toni Gossett, Javier Lopez, TJ Scherping, Victor Bader, Daniel Tillema and Suzie Guo, as well as (not pictured) Atheer Alqatari, Tanner Bobak, Matt Burley, Adam Cronce, Katie Oswalt, Cathryn Toomey, and Aaron Wesche.
CU Boulder students won the regional Chem-E-Car competition on April 1, smoking the competition and ensuring a berth at the national competition in October.
The student group spent eight months developing and testing their entry, a 4.5-pound vehicle propelled entirely by chemical reactions. Through grit, teamwork and a little luck, the team emerged victorious when their wheeled creation stopped just 2 centimeters off the finish line.
“It was the culmination of way too much work,” team member TJ Scherping said.
Chem-E-Car is an annual engineering competition hosted by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) that challenges student groups to construct a car that uses chemical energy to carry a specific load over a given distance before stopping.
“Exactly one hour before competition starts, they tell us the distance that our car has to travel and the weight that our car has to carry,” team member Toni Gossett said. “What we’re doing in the lab is creating calibration curves so we know how our car’s going to operate under any load or distance that they give us.”
A core group of about a dozen undergraduates began meeting in August to research and plan, then started building and testing prototypes in January. They opted for a hydrogen fuel cell to power the car, coupled with an iodine clock whose color-changing chemical reaction would stop the motor.
The path to victory was filled with challenges. The team had to scrap much of its early trial data and order new chemicals after realizing their original reactants had decayed over time. Despite testing each segment of the vehicle dozens of times, they had only enough reactants for one test of the complete vehicle before competition.
During practice runs, they measured their chemicals using a scale accurate to one-thousandth of a gram, but when they arrived at competition, they had to work with a scale that measured to only one-tenth of a gram.
Even getting through airport security with their contraption – including two feet of wire, glassware and electronic components – raised stress levels. But after a close evaluation by the TSA, the car and team made it to the competition at the University of North Dakota.
When their moment arrived, the team set the car in motion and nervously followed as it made its 72-second journey across 22.4 meters, stopping almost perfectly on the tape marking the finish line.
“When we hit the line, all of us were jumping up and down, we were hugging each other,” Gossett said. “I’m not a sports person, so this is my moment that I can feel really excited. This is my Super Bowl.”
The team plans to make a few tweaks and more practice runs before heading to the national competition in Minneapolis in October, where they’ll compete against teams from across the nation and their own backyards. Arizona State University and Colorado State University, the second and third place regional finishers, also will travel to the finals.
Even if they don’t win, team members said they’re grateful for the hands-on experience. Chem-E-Car allowed them to devise creative solutions, practice lab techniques, depend on one another and strive for “freaky accuracy.”
“This is an opportunity for a lot of chemical engineers to get hands-on experience, especially for people who aren’t working in a research lab,” Scherping said.
The team is actively recruiting for next year’s Chem-E-Car team and is seeking students from a variety of departments. Email chemecar@colorado.edu to learn more or watch for interest meetings in August 2017.