Senior
engineering students will design build and test a new breed of
human powered vehicle (HPV) to win ASME’s national HPV contest.
The team this year will include students from mechanical engineering,
materials engineering, and biomedical engineering.
The
team of approximately 20 students will work with a wide variety
of industrial sponsors and partners to achieve an innovative and
fast HPV. This is the third year of the MTU HPV program. The last
two years, we won the design and innovation category and placed
highly in overall team points.
Our
designs have been widely recognized as the best entries the competition
has seen. We were the first team in the history of the program
to enter a multiconfiguration vehicle to optimize performance
in all events. We were the first to successfully include a linear
drive. We have let the way in the use of composites. It is our
goal to build on last year’s efforts, not by tweaking a successful
vehicle, but by continuing to innovate.
Typically,
teams come back with essentially the same vehicle year after year.
Each year the vehicle will undergo minor modifications and improvements.
MTU will operate differently. We will look to take those successful
innovations from last year and add to them a few significant innovations.
The result will be an entirely new vehicle.
This
year, students will attack two areas for innovation and two areas
for significant design improvement. We will put to rest the concept
of a multi-configurational vehicle and concentrate on the speed
and endurance race. We will look for significant improvements
in the use of a linear drive and significant improvements in the
weight of the vehicle.
Other
design emphases will be the improvement of the fairing component
alignments – hopefully resulting in a new molding method and a
radically different monococque frame design. We also perhaps can
include video-based vision. The major difference in this year’s
vehicle will be the push towards increased analysis and testing.
With two old vehicles to test and new testing capabilities, we
should be far ahead of previous years’ entries.
