The race for chemical engineering is quite literally on. Every year, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AlChE) brings together hundreds of university students to face-off to design the fastest car using techniques they’ve learned from chemical engineering courses.
The Chem-E-Car competition races cars which are only powered by chemical reactions. The goal is to come up with an elegant solution – you can’t simply jettison matter out the back as the method of locomotion. In particular, the rules don’t allow the use of liquid or obnoxious odor discharge, commercial batteries, brakes, or electrical/mechanical timing devices. However, this doesn’t mean that electronics are absent from these designs. Many teams must gather data in order to design a control system to improve the performance of their car.
Students have to build a power system, stopping mechanism, circuitry, and mechanical assembly for the body of the car, all to fit in a size constraint not much bigger than a shoebox. The competition primarily judges the accuracy of the chemical reaction for stopping the car more so than speed or power. Given that the load the car must carry is typically unknown until the day of the competition, this is a significant challenge, allowing teams to find a way to design a flexible reaction that can accommodate a range of loads and distances.
For example, this 2015 entry from the Rice University team (PDF) uses a fuel cell for locomotion and an iodine clock reaction as a timer for braking. The fuel cell powers an Arduino which monitors a light-dependent resistor. In between the LED and th ..
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