photo credit: Nate Edwards | BYU
Last month at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway a team of BYU engineers sent their hand-built machine around a ten-mile course and recorded a result that still seems impossible on paper. Their vehicle covered the distance using barely a thimbleful of ethanol and returned 2,145 miles per gallon, enough to carry the same amount of fuel from Provo, Utah, all the way to New York City.
The event was part of the Shell Eco-marathon, and just shy of eighty teams from all over the Americas showed up with one goal in mind: go the distance with the least amount of fuel possible. The rules kept things clear and straightforward. The course was a predetermined loop that drivers had to complete, with judges precisely assessing how far each vehicle could go on a specific amount of ethanol. Don’t even get me started on the weather; a headwind can undo all of your hard work in an instant, so every decision made, from the form to the weight, was important.
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A team from Brigham Young University (BYU) arrived with an innovative three-wheeler encased in carbon fiber, weighing only 108 pounds before the driver even sat in, and that driver had to be under five feet four inches tall and no more than 120 pounds to fit into the tiny cockpit. Once inside, with no air conditioning, no audio, and no extra buttons to mess with, everything had been sacrificed for one and only one reason: to keep that machine running as smoothly as possible.
The power comes from a compact engine, which is fueled by a tiny little bottle containing only thirty milliliters of ethanol. That’s the thing: picking ethanol was a deliberate decision; it has less energy per gallon than gasoline, but it allows you to run the engine at a greater compression ratio, which helps a lot within these extremely strict competition parameters. The top speed, which is actually not very fast, is 23 miles per hour; this is the sweet spot between going someplace and losing efficiency. The brakes are rarely utilized since the driver simply allows the momentum bring them to a stop, allowing the automobile to do all of the work.
Twenty mechanical engineering students spent months on the project. No single person assembled the whole machine. One group shaped the body panels. Another tuned the drivetrain. Others tested airflow and calculated every gram of weight. Faculty advisor Dale Tree watched the effort take shape and later noted that the students treat each component as its own engineering challenge. “No one person builds a whole car,” he said. “It is a team of engineers that are going to build each component of the car.”
Club president Camille Nobrega spent three years with the group and felt the final weeks pull everyone closer. “We worked so hard and I am grateful for all the members of the team and their commitment,” she recalled. “As we got closer to the competition it did not feel difficult to put in a few more hours here and there because of the people around me.”
