Solar Car Challenge

On Thursday 29th April, 17 students travelled to UniSA Mawson Lakes to meet with a team of professors to start learning how we can convert a Polaris Electric Vehicle into a Solar Car to enter into the Bridgestone Solar Car Challenge in future years. These initial students have shown their enthusiasm to learn about the event to be able to collaboratively lead this project across their time in High School.
Professor Peter Majewski of the UniSA Future Industries institute, greeted us with the UniSA marketing team and took us on a tour of UniSA where we learnt about uni life and had an introduction to solar cars. We were surprised to learn that the first solar car was invented in 1955 and the first electric car was invented in the late 1880s!Ass Professor Peter Pudney, Technical Committee Chair of the Bridgestone Solar Car Challenge, spoke about all the different classes of competition within the event and described in detail the physics behind the winning cars. Students were very interested in how the car designs have changed drastically over the past 30 years including more efficient solar panels, change in aerodynamic designs, development in battery technology and the changes in rules in line with the progression in science.
After lunch, we learnt about how UniSA have approached the Solar Car project and how the project reaches many teams beyond engineering, including design, marketing, business and more. We then were able to sit in the UniSA solar car and take our photo on the Guinness Book of Records longest bike!
We have returned excited to continue this project and are eager to get started and build our student and staff team across different learning areas.Staff will be meeting soon to share information we have learnt and UniSA representatives will be visiting later this term for further collaboration.
For more information please come to Open Night on Wednesday 19th May.