Chemical Reaction Propels UMaine Student Car to First Place Honors
Contact: John Hwalek (207) 581-2302; Tom Weber (207) 581-3777
ORONO — A small hydrogen-fueled vehicle built by a team of University of Maine chemical engineering students took top honors at the northeast regional Chem-E-Car competition, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
With the first-place win on March 25, the second in three years by a UMaine team, the shoebox-size car earned a slot in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) national Chem-E-Car championships that will take place in Philadelphia in November.
The goal of the Chem-E-Car challenge is to create some form of chemical reaction that will power a student-built car as it carries a designated amount of water over a specified distance. The car that stops closest to the finish line wins, which means the students must carefully calculate the chemical reactions to create controlled and reproducible results.
“At a time when the United States is focused on looking for alternative fuels,” notes the AIChE, “the Chem-E-Car competition is an important venue for college students to learn about chemical reactions that can move vehicles.”
The UMaine team’s hydrogen fuel cell power source, and iodine chemical-clock stopping mechanism, represented how much more sophisticated the competition has become since it began in 1999. Back then, many cars were powered simply by a jet of liquid squirted rearward. A team might mix baking soda and vinegar in a plastic bottle, for instance, set the bottle on the car, uncap it and let it fly. Over the years, some teams — UMaine included — have propelled cars with the oxygen created by mixing pureed beef liver with hydrogen peroxide.
The results were predictably messy, wet and smelly — not exactly the sort of safe and environmentally responsible science its sponsor organization hoped to instill in its next generation of chemical engineers. So today, the contest allows no discharge of materials, except for innocuous gases.
The teams are not told exactly how far their cars will have to travel, or how much weight they’ll carry, until an hour before the competition begins. Once those details are announced, the teams scramble to make their calculations. On its first try — each team is allowed two — the UMaine car moved faster than its builders anticipated and overshot the designated 50-foot line by 10 feet.
After adjusting the reaction, the 10-member team set the car on the track for its final attempt, hit the switch, and stood watching anxiously. The little car rolled away, at two feet a second, spurred on by the wonders of chemistry and the team’s slow, rhythmic clapping.
“We had put so much work into it, months of work, so we were really feeling the pressure on that second run,” says Sam Gerges, a senior and the captain of the UMaine team that was advised by John Hwalek, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering.
Having successfully gotten the car to move, the team now had to worry about where it would stop. That’s where the chemical clock came in. On the car was a chemical solution, through which an LED light passed before reaching a sensor. The clear solution would progressively darken until the light could no longer penetrate it, thereby breaking the circuit and stopping the motor. If the student calculations were correct, that would happen very near the 50-foot line.
And it did. The car came to rest a mere 23 inches beyond the mark, as the students leaped and whooped and shared high-fives. Its nearest competitor, the car from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, came in second place after stopping three feet from the line.
“If we’d had a third try,” says Gerges, “we would have nailed it.”
The other team members are seniors Heather Glidden, Nicholas Landry, Katherine Lumino, Brandon Meyer, Andrew Pierce, Amy St. Peter and Megan Worcester; sophomores Thomas Schwartz and Gregory Worster, and first-year students Jeffrey Galle and Mathew Pagurko.