Saddleback College joins 2011 Energy Invitational
Saddleback College will run their Formula V at the 2011 UCI Energy Invitational. Here is photo of the chassis and suspension without the body.
Entries by Prof. McCarthy
MillenWorks to show LUV at 2011 Energy Invitational
MillenWorks will show their LUV (Light Utility Vehicle) at the the 2011 Energy Invitational at Willow Springs Motorsports Park on March 30, 2011. It has a unique all wheel drive parallel hybrid powertrain for reduced fuel consumption and silent watch capability with extensive on-board power.
Toyota to show two vehicles at 2011 Energy Invitational
Toyota will demonstrate their Advanced Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle at the Energy Invitational at Willow Springs on March 30, 2011. They will also demonstrate their Prius Plug-in Hybrid.
Smitty’s Engineering Training Videos
The training videos that Smitty developed for our design classes at UCI can be access at the YouTube site: Engineering Training Site. The videos include basic welding 1 and 2, hand tools, soldering, metal forming 1 and 2, cutting, filing grinding and fitting metal for welding, measurements and layouts, and fasteners.
Philip Chipman’s Electric Wind to compete in EI2
Phil Chipman, a local inventor, is returning to the UCI Energy Invitational with his electric three-wheeler. In last year’s event, Phil’s Electric Wind won the award for maximum projected distance on $1.00 worth of energy. Here is a photo of his vehicle: Here is another view: For more photos, select this link for his webpage.
UCLA Supermileage may join Energy Invitational
Melody Vo of the UCLA Super mileage team reports that the change in dates of the Energy Invitational may affect their plans to attend this event. Here is the photo of their proposed entry which competed successfully in Shell Eco-Marathon.
Brian Wang to compete in the Energy Invitational
Brian Wang has sent some photographs of the vehicle he plans to enter into the 2011 UCI Energy Invitational. Here is one: Here is another view of the car: And a photo of the driver’s compartment:
Revised Three-panel Hardtop Convertible Linkage
Oscar Alonso replaced the parallelogram drive linkages of the three-panel Volve C70 hardtop convertible with quadrilateral linkages, so it deploys farther and stows more compactly. The wheelbase of this vehicle approaches that of the Mercedes CL500. He used our Mathematica linkage synthesis notebook and our Mechanism Generator add-in for SolidWorks.
Kinetic Sculpture: Bucephale
This video shows a kinetic sculpture of a horse by the artist Francois Hameury. His website is http://hameury.sculptures.pagesperso-orange.fr/index.htm
Spherical Four-Bar Linkages
Here is something new. Our Mathematica notebook can find defect-free spherical four-bar linkages that guide a body through five orientations in a tolerance zone near a specified set of task orientations.