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    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Energy

      MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team wins 2021 American Solar Challenge

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      After three years of hard work, the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team took first place at the 2021 American Solar Challenge (ASC) on August 7 in the Single Occupancy Vehicle (SOV) category. During the five-day race, their solar car, Nimbus — designed and built entirely by students — beat eight other SOVs from schools across the country, traversing 1,109 miles and maintaining an average speed of 38.4 miles per hour.

      Held every two years, the ASC has traditionally been a timed event. This year, however, the race was based on the total distance traveled. Each team followed the same prescribed route, from Independence, Missouri, to Las Vegas, New Mexico. But teams could drive additional miles within each of the three stages — if their battery had enough juice to continue. Nimbus surpassed the closest runner-up, the University of Kentucky, by over 100 miles.

      “It’s still a little surreal,” says SEVT captain Aditya Mehrotra, a rising senior in electrical engineering and computer science. “We were all hopeful, but I don’t think you ever go into racing like, ‘We got this.’ It’s more like, ‘We’re going to do our best and see how we fare.’ In this case, we were fortunate enough to do really well. The car worked beautifully, and — more importantly — the team worked beautifully and we learned a lot.”

      Team work makes the dream work

      Two weeks before the ASC race, each solar car was put through its paces in the Formula Sun Grand Prix at Heartland Motorsports Park in Topeka, Kansas. First, vehicles had to perform a series of qualifying challenges, called “scrutineering.” Cars that passed could participate in a track race in hopes of qualifying for ASC. Nimbus placed second, completing a total of 239 laps around the track over three days (equivalent to 597.5 miles).

      In the process, SEVT member and rising junior in mechanical engineering Cameron Kokesh tied the Illinois State driver for the fastest single lap time around the track, clocking in at three minutes and 19 seconds. She’s not one to rest on her laurels, though. “It would be fun to see if we could beat that time at the next race,” she says with a smile.

      Nimbus’s performance at the Formula Sun Grand Prix and ASC is a manifestation of team’s proficiency in not only designing and building a superior solar vehicle, but other skills, as well, including managing logistics, communications, and teamwork. “It’s a huge operation,” says Mehrotra. “It’s not like we drive the car straight down the highway during the race.”

      Indeed, Nimbus travels with an impressive caravan of seven vehicles manned by about two dozen SEVT members. A scout vehicle is at the front, monitoring road and weather conditions, followed by a lead car that oversees navigation. Nimbus is third in the caravan, trailed by a chase vehicle, in which the strategy team manages tasks like monitoring telemetry data, calculating how much power the solar panels are generating and the remaining travel distance, and setting target speeds. Bringing up the rear are the transport truck and trailer, a media car, and “Cupcake,” a support vehicle with food, supplies, and camping gear.

      Leading up to the three-week event, the team devoted three years to designing, building, refining, and testing Nimbus. (The ASC was scheduled for 2020, but it was postponed until this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.) They spent countless hours in the MIT Edgerton Center’s machine shop in Building N51, making, building, and iterating. They drove the car in the greater-Boston area, up to Salem, Massachusetts, and to Cape Cod. In the spring, they traveled to Palmer Motorsports Park in Palmer, Massachusetts, to practice various components of the race. They performed scrutineering tasks like the slalom test and figure eight test, conducted team operations training to optimize the caravan’s performance, and, of course, the “shakedown.” 

      “Shakedown is just, you drive the car around the track and you basically see what falls off and then you know what you need to fix,” Mehrotra explains. “Hopefully nothing too major falls off!”

      The road ahead

      At the conclusion of the race, Mehotra officially stepped down and handed SEVT’s reins to its new leaders: Kotesh will take the helm as team captain, and rising sophomore Sydney Kim, an ocean engineering major, will serve as vice-captain. The long drive back from the Midwest gave them time to reflect on the win and future plans.

      Although Nimbus performed well, there were a few instructive glitches here and there, mostly during scrutineering. But there was nothing the team couldn’t handle. For example, the canopy latch didn’t always hold, so the clear acrylic bubble covering the driver would pop open. (A little spring adjustment and tape did the trick.) In addition, Nimbus had a tendency to skid when the driver slammed on the brakes. (Driver training, and letting some air out of the tires, improved the traction.)

      Then there were the unpredictable variables, beyond the team’s control. On one day, with little sun, Nimbus had to chug along the highway at a mere 15 miles per hour. And there was the time that the Kansas State Police pulled the entire caravan over. “They didn’t realize we were coming through,” Mehrotra explains.

      Kim thinks one of the keys to the team’s success is that Nimbus is quite reliable. “We didn’t have wheels falling off on the road. Once we got the car rolling, things didn’t go wrong mechanically or electrically. Also, it’s very energy efficient because it’s lightweight and the shape of the vehicle is very aerodynamic. On a nice sunny day, it allows us to drive 40 miles per hour energy-neutral — the battery stays at the same amount of charge as we drive,” she says.

      The next ASC will take place in 2022, so this year the team will focus on refining Nimbus to race it again next summer. Also, they’ve set their sights on building a car to enter in the Multiple Occupancy Vehicle (MOV) class in the 2024 race — something the team has never done. “It will definitely take the three years to build a good car to compete,” Kotesh muses. “But it’s a really good transition period, after doing so well on this race, so our team is excited about it.”

      “It will be challenging for them, but I wouldn’t put it anything past them,” says Patrick McAtamney, the Edgerton Center technical instructor and shop manager who works with all the student clubs and teams, from solar vehicles to Formula race cars to rockets. He attended ASC, too, and has the utmost admiration for SEVT. “It’s totally student-run. They do all the designing and machining themselves. I always tell people that sometimes I feel like my only job is to make sure they have 10 fingers when they leave the shop.”

      In the meantime, before the school year begins, SEVT has another challenge: deciding where to put the trophy. “It’s huge,” McAtamney says. “It’s about the size of the Stanley Cup!” More

    • 38 Shares189 Views

      in Energy

      A material difference

      by

      Eesha Khare has always seen a world of matter. The daughter of a hardware engineer and a biologist, she has an insatiable interest in what substances — both synthetic and biological — have in common. Not surprisingly, that perspective led her to the study of materials.

      “I recognized early on that everything around me is a material,” she says. “How our phones respond to touches, how trees in nature to give us both structural wood and foldable paper, or how we are able to make high skyscrapers with steel and glass, it all comes down to the fundamentals: This is materials science and engineering.”

      As a rising fourth-year PhD student in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), Khare now studies the metal-coordination bonds that allow mussels to bind to rocks along turbulent coastlines. But Khare’s scientific enthusiasm has also led to expansive interests from science policy to climate advocacy and entrepreneurship.

      A material world

      A Silicon Valley native, Khare recalls vividly how excited she was about science as a young girl, both at school and at myriad science fairs and high school laboratory internships. One such internship at the University of California at Santa Cruz introduced her to the study of nanomaterials, or materials that are smaller than a single human cell. The project piqued her interest in how research could lead to energy-storage applications, and she began to ponder the connections between materials, science policy, and the environment.

      As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Khare pursued a degree in engineering sciences and chemistry while also working at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. There, she grew fascinated by environmental advocacy in the policy space, working for then-professor Gina McCarthy, who is currently serving in the Biden administration as the first-ever White House climate advisor.

      Following her academic explorations in college, Khare wanted to consider science in a new light before pursuing her doctorate in materials science and engineering. She deferred her program acceptance at MIT in order to attend Cambridge University in the U.K., where she earned a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science. “Especially in a PhD program, it can often feel like your head is deep in the science as you push new research frontiers, but I wanted take a step back and be inspired by how scientists in the past made their discoveries,” she says.

      Her experience at Cambridge was both challenging and informative, but Khare quickly found that her mechanistic curiosity remained persistent — a realization that came in the form of a biological material.

      “My very first master’s research project was about environmental pollution indicators in the U.K., and I was looking specifically at lichen to understand the social and political reasons why they were adopted by the public as pollution indicators,” Khare explains. “But I found myself wondering more about how lichen can act as pollution indicators. And I found that to be quite similar for most of my research projects: I was more interested in how the technology or discovery actually worked.”

      Enthusiasm for innovation

      Fittingly, these bioindicators confirmed for her that studying materials at MIT was the right course. Now Khare works on a different organism altogether, conducting research on the metal-coordination chemical interactions of a biopolymer secreted by mussels.

      “Mussels secrete this thread and can adhere to ocean walls. So, when ocean waves come, mussels don’t get dislodged that easily,” Khare says. “This is partly because of how metal ions in this material bind to different amino acids in the protein. There’s no input from the mussel itself to control anything there; all the magic is in this biological material that is not only very sticky, but also doesn’t break very readily, and if you cut it, it can re-heal that interface as well! If we could better understand and replicate this biological material in our own world, we could have materials self-heal and never break and thus eliminate so much waste.”

      To study this natural material, Khare combines computational and experimental techniques, experimentally synthesizing her own biopolymers and studying their properties with in silico molecular dynamics. Her co-advisors — Markus Buehler, the Jerry McAfee Professor of Engineering in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Niels Holten-Andersen, professor of materials science and engineering — have embraced this dual-approach to her project, as well as her abundant enthusiasm for innovation.

      Khare likes to take one exploratory course per semester, and a recent offering in the MIT Sloan School of Management inspired her to pursue entrepreneurship. These days she is spending much of her free time on a startup called Taxie, formed with fellow MIT students after taking the course 15.390 (New Enterprises). Taxie attempts to electrify the rideshare business by making electric rental cars available to rideshare drivers. Khare hopes this project will initiate some small first steps in making the ridesharing industry environmentally cleaner — and in democratizing access to electric vehicles for rideshare drivers, who often hail from lower-income or immigrant backgrounds.

      “There are a lot of goals thrown around for reducing emissions or helping our environment. But we are slowly getting physical things on the road, physical things to real people, and I like to think that we are helping to accelerate the electric transition,” Khare says. “These small steps are helpful for learning, at the very least, how we can make a transition to electric or to a cleaner industry.”

      Alongside her startup work, Khare has pursued a number of other extracurricular activities at MIT, including co-organizing her department’s Student Application Assistance Program and serving on DMSE’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council. Her varied interests also have led to a diverse group of friends, which suits her well, because she is a self-described “people-person.”

      In a year where maintaining connections has been more challenging than usual, Khare has focused on the positive, spending her spring semester with family in California and practicing Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance, over Zoom. As she looks to the future, Khare hopes to bring even more of her interests together, like materials science and climate.

      “I want to understand the energy and environmental sector at large to identify the most pressing technology gaps and how can I use my knowledge to contribute. My goal is to figure out where can I personally make a difference and where it can have a bigger impact to help our climate,” she says. “I like being outside of my comfort zone.” More