12 October 2009

An Elegant and Energy Efficient Solar Race Car called Sunswift IVy

UNSW’s Solar Racing Team held a launch party to unveil its new elegant and energy-efficient contender for the Global Green Challenge: ‘IVy’, the team’s fourth vehicle, as well as Sunswift Open*. Taking the team from Darwin to Adelaide in just four days, the grueling challenge will test the practical and personal limits of the student engineers. The team is solely student run and fully funded through corporate sponsorships totaling $250,000.

With renewable energy on the top of almost everyone’s agenda, it is difficult to ignore the implications of Sunswift’s operations on the rest of the sphere of sustainability. Sunswift’s fourth generation car challenges the existing frontiers of energy efficiency, weight reduction, energy storage and energy consumption strategy. The technologies will eventually be implemented across a wide variety of fields. The launch will also bring together corporate sponsors from Boeing, NICTA, Benelec to name a few, as well as educational guests from various faculties of UNSW. For the team, this event represents a pivotal moment in Sunswift’s history. With countless hours of design and engineering behind them, the students are seeing their work come to a cohesive whole. Now, they are preparing for the next step: the Global Green Challenge in October.

The Sunswift solar car incorporates the industry’s most efficient silicon solar cells, the Passivated Emitter and Rear Locally-diffused (PERL) silicon solar cells. These cells use a process that was developed and perfected at the University of New South Wales. The solar cells on the car also use encapsulation, a process perfected by Bochum and Solar Technologies. Encapsulation involves texturing the cells through an etching process to maximize absorption of the suns rays. Additionally, the car uses maximum power point trackers and 99% efficient motor controllers. The controllers ensure that maximum power is delivered to the wheels and any extra energy is stored in lithium ion batteries used by peripheral devices.

All of this is accomplished on 10% of the budget of other solar racing teams (e.g. Michigan, USA and the Netherlands), and entirely sustained through corporate sponsorship.

For more information or interviews please contact,
Clara Mazzone
Sunswift
Project Leader
04 4916 0600

*Sunswift Open is a web-portal where the team will share its programming with the rest of the world in the form of open source to inspire greater creativity in this area of energy efficiency and sustainability.