Momentum - November 2020 - 10

STUDENT GENERATION

ONE-ON-ONE LIAM MACGILLIVRAY
Keweenaw Research Institute/Michigan Technological University

WHAT COULD BE BETTER THAN WINNING the Spark Ignition
Class of the SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge (CSC)? Winning
it twice in a row.
That's the goal of Liam MacGillivray, president of the
Michigan Tech snowmobile team that topped 13 other team at
the 2020 running of the CSC. He told MOMENTUM that he
expects to graduate from Michigan Tech in May 2021, "and will
be looking for a leadership development position utilizing my
mechanical engineering expertise."
MOMENTUM caught up with MacGillivary this summer via
email to talk about the team's 2020 championship
performance.
How satisfying was it for you as 2019-2020 team captain to
have led your team to first place in the IC Class?
I was extremely impressed with the team's first win this year. It
took a lot of dedicated team members and late nights to pull it
off. The Michigan Tech team has competed since this
competition first ran in 2000, and we have never taken home
the trophy. At the beginning of the competition, William
Predebon, the head of Michigan Tech's Mechanical Engineering
Department, stopped by and asked me if we would win this
year and I answered "Yes." I have been on the team since the
fall of 2017, but this was the first year we felt confident in our
snowmobile's performance.
This was our third and final year bringing our 2016 Yamaha
Venture platform to competition. We had been competitive the
past two years, but we were never able to be the front-runners
in each category simultaneously. The Yamaha Venture brought

Michigan Tech's #14 SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge sled is shown here
competing in the Subjective Handling Event at the 2020 competition.
several challenges: it was heavy, it created a substantial
amount of driveline noise, and it has a large-displacement
engine. None of these aspects was well suited for the
competitions main goals, which are to create a clean and quiet
snowmobile that is still fun to ride. The two previous
years, there was substantial effort put into quieting
the chassis and driveline of the sled and improving the
engine calibration. 

Keweenaw Research Institute/Michigan Technological University

What was the most important factor in the team's
victory?

The Michigan Tech team competed in both classes (Compression Ignition and Spark
Ignition) at the 2020 SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge.

10 November 2020

The biggest key to our success was successfully
implementing a low-emission, fuel-efficient tune, and
eliminating excess noise being emitted from the
sled. Several steps led to the success of the team's
engine calibration this season, including increasing
the resolution of the fuel and ignition tables to
provide more calibration points; collecting on-snow
temperature, lambda, and fuel-economy readings that
were then used to make additional calibration
changes; and devoting significant focus to the onsnow performance and rider experience related to the
engine calibration. To quiet the sled, we used four
quarter-wave resonators tuned to target various firing
frequencies emitted from the engine. Two of these

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Momentum - November 2020

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