UMaine Clean Snowmobile Team Ranks 5th at Competition
Contact: Michael Peterson, (207) 581-2129; Aimee Dolloff, (207) 581-3777
ORONO, Maine – The University of Maine Clean Snowmobile Team ranked fifth in last week’s 2009 Society of Automotive Engineers Clean Snowmobile Challenge in Michigan. The team also walked away with a cold start award.
UMaine’s 2009 performance and reengineering of a stock snowmobile was an improvement over the team’s ninth place finish last year.
The Clean Snowmobile Challenge is a collegiate design competition of the Society of Automotive Engineers, held annually at Michigan Technological University.
This year’s UMaine team included the following students: Brendan Goodwin, Katelyn Wheeler, Joshua Collupy, Xibei Ding, Michael Lovett, Bennett Luja, and Drake Voisine.
The team’s goal was to reduce emissions and noise while maintaining or boosting the snowmobile’s performance. This year, the internal-combustion entries adapted their engines to run on flex-fuel, with varying ratios of ethanol and gasoline.
In redesigning their base machine, which is a second-generation, tuned four-stroke powered 2007 Yamaha Phazer, the UMaine team wanted to reduce exhaust emissions of hydrocarbon and carbon dioxide without changing the level of NOx pollutants.
They also needed to adapt the machine to use ethanol-based fuels, such as ethanol and butanol, while reducing the snowmobiles noise emissions.
All of these goals needed to be met in the most cost-effective way possible because teams are awarded points on the overall value of the sled they design.
“The greatest success of the year is the huge improvement in the UMaine paper score,” says Michael Peterson, UMaine team advisor and Associate Dean for Research Engineering.~”This is a testament to the leadership of the team by Kate Wheeler and her co-captain Brendan Goodwin.”
Goodwin was the designated snowmobile rider for the team during the competition.
“Most impressively the team worked productively throughout the year and right through the pressure of the competition,” says Peterson.~”When emotions are high, the ability to work as a team is critical, and this years UMaine Clean Snowmobile Team was the most balanced and calm student competition team ever.”
He also credited this year’s performance to the team’s many UMaine and area supporters, including Murray Callaway, the team’s English department faculty advisor, Friend & Friend of Orono, Walbro and Lee Thompson of Flowmaster, and UMaine’s College of Engineering and Thomas P. Hosmer Design Center.
More information is available at www.mtukrc.org/snowmobile.htm. Photos of the UMaine Clean Snowmobile Team and their sled also are available upon request.