At this year’s Fluid Power Vehicle Challenge, a team of six Department of Mechanical Engineering undergraduate students took second place overall in the competition, along with taking first place in the sprint race and second in the endurance and efficiency races. The team included students Jon Dromey, Talon Rencher, Chris West, Cole Huseby, Jonathan Moriel, and Johnny Vaughey. Professor M Dillon mentored the team.
The Fluid Power Vehicle Challenge is sponsored by the National Fluid Power Association (NFPA) and gives teams from universities across the country an opportunity to compete. Teams build a vehicle that combines a human-powered vehicle with fluid power. These vehicles include an accumulator for storing energy, an electronic control system for the vehicle, and regeneration technology.
The students were able to start with the work done by the previous year’s team, as well as taking their advice to “get to the testing phase as early as possible.” While some of the components were reused from the previous year, the bike was almost entirely rebuilt.
“We tried to start getting our hands dirty as early as possible,” said Jon Dromey. “We started putting things together and testing them before we had our full design planned out and this testing informed some of our design decisions and helped us home in on the best approach.”
The group used a wide range of skills as they worked on the project, including CAD, fluid dynamics, piping and instrumentation diagrams, and manufacturing. This pushed the group to try new things and problem-solve as they worked through building the bike.
“The most challenging part of the build was getting the drive train to work reliably,” said Dromey. “We had problems with chains grinding on things, not aligning, coming loose, and even falling off. It took a few tries fabricating the drive train parts to get it to work well.”
Despite these challenges, and an issue with the bike being too top heavy when they arrived at the race, the team was able to overcome these challenges and did well across multiple challenges, ultimately placing second overall.
“The event was an amazing experience,” said Dromey. “It was great to meet the students at the other schools and see the wide variety of approaches they took. Everyone on the team had a lot of fun building the bike and competing. The NFPA did an outstanding job putting it together and making a great experience for everyone.”