After a few long nights, and a lot of hard work, the Buckeye Bullet 2 made its track debut yesterday. We wanted to check the suspension and brakes, and see that everything was acting like it was supposed to. We were able to get some power to it from the fuel cells, and got the car up to 80 mph. We'll be getting things ready this week, and making a few changes to head back to the track this weekend!Enjoy some photos and a video from yesterday!
Our computing sponsor (The Ohio Supercomputer Center), through whom we do all of our aerodynamic simulations, has posted some videos that were shot by them with our team out on the salt flats this summer. This is some of the same footage that was used by WOSU to produce an imix segment for the Big Ten Network. This time, the videos are a bit more aimed towards a super-computing audience (you can take that both ways). Some of the BB2 Videos:
(See more videos at the OSC Video site)
The BB2 was mentioned recently with regards to the upcoming football championship game against Louisiana State University. Specifically, they used it to compare the speed of the two teams...
The transcript reads:
This past August, Ohio State Engineering students did something quite special. They piloted a Hydrogen Fuel Cell powered streamliner racer over 200 mph, called the Buckeye Bullet 2, marking a historic milestone for alternative fuel vehicles. You may not be able to teach speed, but apparently you can teach students how to create it. With LSU looming in the BCS national title game, some might say their next project should be transfering some of that speed to the Buckeyes football team. As Tom Rinaldi tells us, they may not have to...Click the photo or link below to view the video.
The OSU ChallengeX team is being featured this Tuesday (12/11/2007) on Good Day Columbus on Fox28 and ABC6. They will be doing a few spots featuring the ChallengeX Hybrid vehicle, as well as one on the Buckeye Bullet 2, to showcase the great things being done at the Center for Automotive Research. (Video hopefully to follow soon)
UPDATE: We have the video from that morning, here is our segment:
Every year it seems, when snow comes down for the first time in the winter, everyone on the roads forgets how to drive. Well, ABC-6 (WSYX) here in Columbus thought they might teach a thing or two about proper technique, so they called on the guy who teaches other people how to test drive. That's right, Roger Schroer, the driver of the BB2, was featured teaching some proper winter driving techniques. Have a look, and perhaps learn a thing or two from the fastest man on electric wheels:
Well, we had hoped to have a run in by the end of the day, but a few gremlins and an earlier track closing caused our run to be postponed until the morning. With the arrival of the BB2 logbook, we completed our technical inspection, and spun up the motor in the pits to get ready to go to the track to run. Right after the motor spun, we had a problem with our controller that set us back a few hours, and sent us chasing our tails for a little bit. We also had some issues with the body fitting onto the car, but with a little nudge and a push, the body is fitting nicely now. So, we believe the problems have been resolved, and the car should be all set to run in the morning. Also, I had hoped to have some video for everyone to see, but this slow internet here has stopped that from happening. Hopefully I can have some up tomorrow night. Until then, I'll have run speeds up as we complete runs from the salt.
Updated : Just kidding, here's the video:
Finally, after a very long period of packing (through the night and all morning), the Buckeye Bullet 2 is on its way to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. Cowen Truck Line picked up the Semi trailer today, and is taking everything (the car, tools, supplies, spare parts, even the kitchen sink) out to the Salt Flats, where we will be meeting it early next week. Of course, here is some video and a few photos of the packing:
Well after being delayed by little things here and there, the car got some very valuable track time at TRC. The brakes were tested, and worked great (even better than the brakes in the chase car we were using). The shifting has gotten worked out, so Roger was able to go through the gears. The fuel cells powered up without any hiccups, and everything seems to be running smoothly. We will be packing everything up tonight into the semi trailer, car, spare parts, equipment and all, so that it can leave by 9am tomorrow (Saturday) morning.
Finally, enjoy some video that we took at the track yesterday and today (the sound is worth listening to, the car sounds pretty unique):
OK, we've been working for the past few weeks now, and I haven't really had a whole lot to update on, other than we're getting salt out of every single nook and cranny of the car. We find salt everywhere, but we've been cleaning all of the parts to make sure that they all will last a long time. Also, once all of the parts were off of the car, we sent the chassis to be sandblasted and painted. Not just any paint though, the chassis is now covered with a hardened, cured polyurethane paint. Thanks to our partners at Ford, we have also spent a lot of effort rewiring and inspecting the electrical connections for possible corrosion, and replacing connections that have been given up to the salt demons. This should help improve the reliability of the electronics, especially on the salt flats.
You may have also noticed that we have a new address here for the blog, seated comfortably at blog.buckeyebullet.com. And, for those generous donations from our supporters (hint, hint), we have a link to the Ohio State donation site by going to give.buckeyebullet.com. After all, we run with the support of everyone, both companies and individuals alike. Thanks to all of you!
CORRECTED 9/21/2007:
Finally, thanks to our friends at WOSU, they have produced a short video using footage that was shot on salt flats at Speedweek. The footage was shot by Jason Poteat, thanks to our fantastic support from the Ohio Supercomputer Center. This video is part of some footage that WOSU is using to put together a documentary on the project, but they've given us a copy to let everyone see, so, here goes...
Alright, we're finally all packed up from the week, and I've had some time to get all of the things that we've collected through the week together. I know the posts dropped out there for a few days, but we were working diligently to fix and work through some challenges that we saw come up with the car. Two nights ago, we worked until about sunrise in a hangar out at the Wendover airport, which was the training site of the WW2 air force units that carried out the operations of dropping the atomic bombs over Japan. It was a very historic and inspirational feeling place to work, and we were back on the salt flats the very next morning (which would have been yesterday).
Anyways, today we captured some cockpit footage of our 201mph run (the last run we made this week). If you see it, you might get an understanding of how calm of a person Roger is. Going 201mph, he is able to calmly operate everything without even looking nervous. How he does it, I do not know. Oh, and he shifted during the run, without us knowing that he did it until after the run. Made us sort of nervous, but it seemed to work pretty well. Enjoy the video, it is one of my favorite cockpit videos that I've been able to capture.
You may have been wondering where we've been for the last couple of days... well we've been working on the brakes. Before we can really go fast we have to be able to stop, so we thought that was pretty important. We finally have figured out how to make them work like we hoped they would, thanks to some good old fashioned problem solving. You may notice in the video and photos that there isn't much in the car currently... well we are in the process of taking apart the car to get the chassis painted, make some changes to some of the assemblies while they are out, to reassemble the car at the end of the week, do some final testing and get it sent out to Bonneville. Well I guess when I put it like that it doesn't sound so bad... is it really August already?
Well, we made it back from the track today, ending the day with a three-pass run where we made it to the maximum allowable speed at TRC of 100 mph. So, we're into the triple digits on fuel cell power. We have managed to find a temporary solution to some of our braking problems, with a permanent fix to implement this coming week, and just make sure that we've got our track organization down. And we've finally got some new video of the car actually moving, from the perspective of the chase truck, hot off the digital video press.
OK, so the change of our fuel cell stacks was actually last week, but we wanted to show you how fast Ballard is at making the change. With help from Ricardo, Mike, Paul, and Becki from Ballard, the stacks were changed out in 2 minutes (well, that's the length of the time lapse video, it may have actually been a few hours...) Either way, the change went quite well, and we are currently getting ready for testing this coming weekend. More to come on that later...
Great success! The team worked through the night (preceded by many other late nights) to have a car that would be ready to test at TRC where we felt comfortable putting it on the ground for the first time. It took a little bit of effort to get the car in and out of the trailer (we used a forklift and the old lifter from the BB1, junkyard wars), but it made it to the track. We were able to do a no load spin test on the driveline with the wheels and suspension installed, and get it to the short straightaway on the road course that they have at TRC. The goal was to get the car to move under its own power, and we were able to do that, twice until we ran out of our air supply that we had brought with us. The team was very happy with the test, and we have a list of improvements that we would like to make to the car, and hope to have it back to the track this coming Saturday. We took some video of the tests, so enjoy!
