Tuesday, March 3, 2009


This past week's effort made some serious steps in the completion of our fuel cell vehicle.  The cable to connect our fuel cell to a laptop has been received.  A new, lighter 2" wide safety harness was ordered, received, and installed in our vehicle.  We estimate that the harness is about three or four pounds lighter than the harness it replaced.  Our horn was tested and in fine working condition.  We spoke a team member from last year, Nate, and he will provide a fire suit and a set of radios with a headset for our driver, Laura, and clarified some wiring issues our team had.  A serial cable has been ordered and is ready for pickup as well.  Our February Newsletter was sent out to our Shell sponsor and professor, Dr. Engel.  Email contact with Ashley Heather was made to provide information for her media questionnaire in regards to our team progress.  This week the procurement of hydrogen filled tanks and completion of rewiring and resoldering the vehicle is expected to be completed.  A meeting with Dr. Anstrom, our fuel cell extraordinaire, will be made to help understand how to wire the supercapacitors into our circuit, and to see is his supercapacitors are applicable to our fuel cell system.  Today we completed our weekly staff meeting with our professor, Dr. Engel and attended the Shell Eco-marathon webcast held this afternoon.  This week we are investigating the purchase of a new hydrogen detector and a new battery with twice the juice, so that we may conduct more runs per battery charge while testing our vehicle.   Look for a new update sometime next week.

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