Solar car race from Darwin to Adelaide highlighted in new movie Dream Big
Updated
Australian engineering students building the next generation of faster, lighter and more efficient solar cars for this year's Darwin to Adelaide race are excited about a new IMAX movie that will showcase the event to an American audience.
The IMAX film Dream Big, which encourages young people to study STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths), is being launched at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC tonight.
The movie shows teams competing in the 3,000-kilometre World Solar Challenge race in 2015 with a focus on an American high school team.
University of New South Wales engineering student Hayden Smith was part of the Australian Sunswift team that is also featured in the movie.
"For me and our team it really is a story about how students give up their spare time to work towards a broader idea than themselves, building a solar car and actually doing things with it," he said.
Mr Smith described the event as akin to being an engineer on a Formula One team.
"The aerodynamic designs, the carbon-fibre composite chassis design, they're all things we're trying to get people excited about," he said.
For Spencer Olds, from the University of Adelaide solar car team, the Dream Big tag is a good fit.
"On a big scale everyone wants a car that you never have to fill up at a petrol station," he said.
He said the ultimate goal was to build a mass produced reliable solar car that never needed to visit a petrol station.
"You could buy it, run it and never have to look under the hood."
Entry to have 30pc less drag
The University of Adelaide team is again competing in the challenger class of the event this year, but new rules have cut the space they can use for solar panels from 6 square metres to 4 square metres.
Mr Olds said the car the team was building for this year's World Solar Challenge would be very different from the previous entry.
"It's going to have 30 per cent less drag, it's going to be a whole lot more efficient, faster and lighter," he said.
Students from Flinders University are building a four-passenger solar car as they prepare to compete in the cruiser passenger-car class of the event for the first time.
Team director Dr Stuart Wildy said technology developed by the university would be built into the car including a telemetry system that enabled car-to-car communication in areas with no mobile phone coverage and regenerative suspension that used movement to charge the car's batteries.
Dr Wildy said there were also plans to integrate technology developed by autonomous vehicle manufacturer RDM to develop a self-driving solar car.
He also believes it is highly likely that the innovative work being done by students competing in the World Solar Challenge will lead to cars of the future being built in Australia.
"We have a number of companies coming to Adelaide now that are looking to develop electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles," he said.
The World Solar Challenge Director Chris Selwood said the IMAX exposure would show an international audience a largely untold Australian story.
"It will show that Australia cares about environmental issues, that Australia cares about innovation, advanced manufacturing, all those wonderful things that we are very good at," he said.
The 30th anniversary World Solar Challenge race starts in Darwin on October 8 and runs until October 15.
At this stage there is no release date for the movie to be shown in Australia.
Topics: solar-energy, engineering, adelaide-5000, darwin-0800
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