Momentum - April 2021 - 15

Student Generation
the car ground to a halt. I stayed at my
apartment near campus for the next couple
weeks, able to continue working in the lab
(with the occasional safe help from my
advisor, with whom I had been working
closely for the several weeks prior). With
everyone else away at their respective
homes, it was slow going for one or two
pairs of hands to draw straight lines,
sand, perfectly align the top and bottom
edges before fusing, lay fiberglass,
sand, spray with primer, scrape off bad
primer, sand, re-spray, sand. . . . In the
end we had a single piece that was
the body-a major milestone.
I was also able to finalize
drawings and CAD models of the
canopy linkages and other components
like the roll bar. With these items
completed, we had a good starting point for next
year's team to cut the canopy sections and install the linkages
and the custom remade windows.
Expected news broke that the in-person competition was
canceled. Obviously, it was quite a bummer-this was my
senior year. It was senior year for a lot of students. But it was
what we were dealt, so what were we going to do with it?
There were talks going on about how to hold a virtual event,
but at that point we had the 25-page written report to
complete.
We threw ourselves into the paper. It was similar to my
senior design report due in the weeks following, so I worked on
both at once, focusing on the SAE requirements first. Working
in parallel streamlined the processes of each. As the saying
goes, " work smarter, not harder. " However, hard work is still
certainly a key component of creating something good. We
went through many revisions, carefully wording it and
choosing illustrations to showcase all our innovations, while
carefully adhering to the competition guidelines. We finally
submitted " SAE Supermileage 2020 Design Report v15 Final.
pdf. " Though we knew there were areas of improvement, we
still placed second in that category.
Then the announcement from SAE came: The virtual
competition would consist of video presentation to judges
with engineering and technical experience. Our next big
challenge was how to effectively and clearly convey to the
judges our designs without our car, with many designs left
unrealized, and with our team spread across the country.
As with the paper, we gave ourselves wholeheartedly to
the task. We divided the presentation into four main
sections, which allowed us to systematically walk
through the functions of the car and explain how
each fit into the bigger picture of fuel
efficiency. Compressing months and years
of work into a 15-minute PowerPoint
presentation is difficult, so we had to be
very selective. Clear communication of

MOMENTUM

The final fused and primed body, which is 11 feet in length.

Zack Bretz holds the top half of the body before aligning and fusing it to
the lower half.

Early CAD design showing an FEA stress analysis of the hinge arms.

April 2021 15
Momentum - April 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Momentum - April 2021
