Legoland Denmark

We are here until Tuesday evening as our ferry does not leave until then so we decided to explore Denmark's most renowned park, Legoland.

Now, I have laughed a lot this weekend but Legoland topped the trip off a treat. I will upload photos when I have the opportunity but for now you will have to suffer a bit of narrative.

It was awesome!!!!!!!!!!!

A bit of a larf and a day to reflect

As we are on a high from successfully finishing in a race we have strapped the 48V batteries that we brought to the vehicle and are driving it around.  Rides to other teams are providing much amusement as the car is pretty speedy on batteries.

Time to relax, teams are frantically packing up and the competitive atmosphere has certainly quelled.

SUCCESS!!!! A finshed race

What a morale boost.  We managed to cross the finish line in a 4-6m/s crosswind.  Our yaw system failed halfway through which slowed us down but we made the 500m stretch of the runway in a cool 29mins 46secs.

The team are certainly relieved and the trip back up the runway upwind where our drag aids us is a fast one. We did what we came to do which was prove the viability of an electric car.  The race today has also provided us with some valuable experience and ideas about how we could crush the competition next year.

Time for some more testing and celebrations.

Last chance at a finish

We have been called onto the race track for our second race of the day.  Having not managed to successfully repair the custom built motor controllers we are using the stock controllers bought with the machines.

There are two risks associated with this.  The first is that the operating voltages for these controllers is limited to around 60v.  If the turbines spin too fast their voltage will exceed this and risk damaging the controllers.  This was the main reason for using our own controllers.

The second problem is that the stock controllers have a limited output current and during testing the vehicle barely started when using them.  The custom controllers are being repair by the team whilst we attempt our race so if they are ready we'll use these in a further race.

Team morale is at its lowest and despite working hard to get the car working again I think that all of our expectations are low at the moment.

PANIC!!!! Second controller fails...

After the push start in our first race of the day we have lost the second controller.  The symptoms for both controller failures are identical, blown MOSFETs but the root cause is unknown as the electric drive system has been fully tested in the wind tunnel.

We suspect shoot through as a result of some noise/crosstalk on the gate drivers but there is little time to try to find this.

The car is sadly wheeled off the track and back into the hanger for an attempt at a speedy repair.

One controller down, one to go.....

Disaster has struck.  For an unknown reason one of our controller channels appears to have blown.  This is a bit of a blow but we can still attempt out first race with a single channel and in this wind still use all of the torque.

Race day 3: morning update

This morning is a bit of a rush. On the whole the car is doing well. It works and as mentioned before we had a test where we has a good run of wind powered movement yesterday. However there has been very little wind so races have not been great for us. Today, the final race day, the wind seems better but now have our work cut out making the vehicle rainproof as it raining quite a bit. If it doesn't get wet and cause problems I believe that today is the day that the finishing line will be ours. The team spirit is high but we are all keen to cross the end of the race today and end positively so all are quite nervous.


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