Welcome to a Biomedical Battery specialist
of the Fluke Battery
Daniel Cambron leaned over the bare chassis of the UK Solar Car Team’s Gato del Sol V and pressed a pedal. The wheels whirred into motion.
“The team does projects the whole year to gear up for … competing against 20 teams over the summer,” Cambron said. “We’re testing some of the controls.”
The team’s garage in the Terrell Building, clearly identified by “UK Solar Car” marked on the outside of the white door, is full of batteries with like Fluke 123 Battery, Fluke 123S Battery, Fluke BP120 Battery, Fluke BP130 Battery, Fluke BP190 Battery, Fluke 190 Battery, Fluke 190C Battery, Fluke 192 Battery, Fluke 192B Battery, Fluke 196 Battery, Fluke 196B Battery, Fluke 196C Battery, wiring, plywood tables and shelves, but is dominated by the wide, Wildcat blue hood of this year’s solar car and its stripped frame and motor on the ground nearby.
During the spring semester, the solar car team, made up of undergraduate students in a range of majors, is gearing up for the Formula Sun Grand Prix, Cambron said. But that’s only after a December victory in the Fluke Connect Student Contest, which called students at two- and four-year colleges to display how using the company’s energy-measuring systems could improve their own projects and make communicating those findings easier.
According to UKNow, the team decreased the car’s idle energy use by 16 percent and increased its dynamic efficiency by 5.5 percent.
Cambron and Joshua Morgan are both electrical engineering and computer engineering seniors in their third and fourth years on the solar car team, respectively.
Morgan said the team found out about its win on Dec. 15 and will head to Fluke Connect headquarters to be presented with an official award and meet with engineers who worked on the tools.
Cambron is the team manager and Morgan is the head of the electrical division. The team is divided into electrical, mechanical and business divisions. The contributions of each are clearly visible in the battery and wiring systems, framework and Nascar-esque sponsorship stickers along the sides of the car.
The solar team builds an entirely new car about every three years, Cambron said, but replaced the entire electrical system of the current model.
“With those changes, we’re really having to focus on the reliability of that car,” Cambron said.
And given the agenda for spring 2015, which involves a lot of “racking up drive time,” the solar car team has a lot on its agenda.
“We take it out to K Lot,” Cambron said. “We look for a wide-open parking lot and just set out traffic cones.”
Morgan added that sometimes the car is wheeled out to “real roads,” like the downtown area, or driven back from Paris, Ky. or Glasgow.
“We can run about three hours only off the batteries and if there’s sun, six to eight,” he said.
Morgan said the barrier to solar cars on the road is the amount of surface area that needs to be dedicated to the solar cells.
“I think that we’ll see a big shift to fully electric cars,” he said, then perhaps a movement to use homes’ roofs to house cells that will charge the batteries.
Both Morgan and Cambron expressed interest in continuing to study circuit controls and use of energy in automotives.