1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar Car - Design

Design

Maize & Blue combined technology typically used in the aerospace, bicycle, alternative energy and automotive industries. Unlike typical race cars, Maize & Blue was designed with severe energy constraints imposed by the race regulations. These rules limited the energy to only that collected from solar radiation and as a result optimizing the design to account for aerodynamic drag, vehicle weight, rolling resistance and electrical efficiency were paramount. Conventional thinking had to be challenged, for example, rather than a conventional automobile seat which would weigh tens of pounds, Maize & Blue employed a nylon mesh seat combined with a five-point harness that weighed less than 3 pounds.

One of the cutting edge, at the time, processes that the team employed in designing Maize & Blue was computer aided design. CAD was used to design almost all of the car using Dassault Systems' CATIA and then modeling the physical characteristics using SDRC I-DEAS and other programs most running on some IBM RS/6000 Unix workstations donated by team sponsor IBM. At the time, CATIA was being used to design the Boeing 777, the first commercial airplane fully designed using CAD. Initially several hand built foam quarter scale models were constructed and tested in the University of Michigan's subsonic low turbulence 5' x 7' wind tunnel. This testing was instrumental in determining the ultimate vehicle configuration. Once finalized, the body of the car was NC milled in quarter scale from the CATIA model and verified in wind tunnel testing. On May 8, 1993, Maize & Blue was tested in a full scale wind tunnel at Lockheed's facility in Atlanta, GA.