UCL Racing Shell Eco-marathon 2018

Team Members

• Pedro Garcia Aguilo
• Rron Vlasaku
• Shubham Sharma
• Karamveer Kapoor
• Einar Jonsson
• Kirill Markov
• Youssef Hegazi
• Sebastiaan Crane

Supervisor

Dr Tim Baker & Dr Nelia Jurado Pontes

The Project

The Shell Eco-marathon brings together University teams from all over Europe to play a role in shifting the focus towards energy solutions our environment can sustain. The ‘Prototype’ category is built around uncompromising fuel efficiency, with all non-essential equipment removed, in order to eliminate every gram of excess weight.

The 2018 UCLR SEM team aim to raise the efficiency benchmark to reach 750 km/m³ by streamlining the powertrain configuration and optimizing fuel cell efficiency. Moreover, it was proposed for the first time to organize the electrical network of the vehicle under a centralized assembly. On the mechanical side, the main goals were to assess the trade-off between a sprag clutch and the freewheel mechanism, reduce the weight of the interior components by another 3 kg and improve ventilation conditions in the driver compartment.

The Design

The 2018 design features a re-designed powertrain system tailored to this year’s competition track. The new configuration is formed of a fuel cell – supercapacitor – motor arrangement, eliminating inefficiencies and additional weight of unnecessary converters and smoothing out power demand curve to maximize fuel efficiency. Moreover, the introduction of an industry standard wiring loom has now organized the electrical network of the vehicle under a robust assembly, improving the data logging capabilities of the vehicle. In addition, improvements in driver ventilation were achieved by re-designing the windows without compromising aerodynamic drag, and concluded that a freewheel mechanism would minimize frictional losses compared to the proposed sprag clutch.

UCL Racing Shell Eco-marathon on the web

Read about the 2017 Shell-Eco marathon.

The team ended up completing 13/15 laps before a misconfigured motor controller due to insufficient testing meant the vehicle ran out of hydrogen! We are disappointed to come so close but the team can be proud of its efforts this year, the obstacles it overcame at the competition (including a faulty fuel cell controller, an erratic regulator and numerous grounding issues) and the efficiency improvements from last year’s vehicle. The team would like to thank everyone for their support over the course of the year! #shellecomarathon #makethefuture

A post shared by UCL Racing Teams (@uclracingteams) on Jul 11, 2018 at 8:43am PDT