Toyota 2010 Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle

Toyota to show two vehicles at 2011 Energy Invitational

Toyota 2010 Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle

Toyota 2010 Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle

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.

Prius Plug-in Hybrid

Prius Plug-in Hybrid

Smitty Training

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.

Chipman's Electric Car

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:

Chipman's Electric Car

Chipman’s Electric Car

Here is another view:

Chipman's Electric Car 2

Chipman’s Electric Car 2

For more photos, select this link for his webpage.

UCLA Supermileage

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.

UCLA Supermileage

UCLA Supermileage

Brian Wang 1

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:

Brian Wang 1

Brian Wang 1

Here is another view of the car:

Brian Wang 2

Brian Wang 2

And a photo of the driver’s compartment:

Brian Wang 3

Brian Wang 3

Hardtop Convertible New

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.

Spherical Fourbar

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.

Geometric Design of Linkages book

Geometric Design of Linkages, second edition

Geometric Design of Linkages, second edition

Geometric Design of Linkages, second edition

I am pleased to say that the second edition of my book, Geometric Design of Linkages, is now available, and I have to express my sincere gratitude to my co-author GimSong Soh, who helped make it happen.

You can find more information at the Springer Verlag web-page, GDL on Springer.com.

It is also already on Google Books, you can see it at the link GDL on books.google.com.

Four-bar Synthesis

Linkage Synthesis Demonstration

This shows the operation of our Mathematica notebook for five-position synthesis of a four-bar linkage.   The link to download and try this notebook is on our Linkage Synthesis page.