With help from the AMS Sustainability Projects Fund, the students of the UBC Solar team were able to design and produce a solar-powered vehicle.
By: Aarjav Jain, Electrical Director at UBC Solar
It’s exciting to see more focus on sustainability at UBC from new AMS clubs and events to hone in on promoting it. One of these groups is UBC Solar, which truly pushes sustainable innovation through engineering. This story talks about how UBC Solar is able to accomplish this with their new Solar Powered Vehicle.
UBC Solar is an interdisciplinary team of over 80 students dedicated to advancing sustainable transportation. We are currently designing and manufacturing Cascadia, our fourth-generation solar-powered vehicle. This is, in its literal sense, a vehicle to prove the viability of solar technology and to prepare students for their careers. Our car will embark on a 2,500 km journey across America operating entirely on solar power. Compared to a standard gasoline-powered vehicle traveling the same distance, this avoids approximately 360 kg of CO₂ emissions, equivalent to the annual carbon capture of 17.5 mature trees.
For UBC Solar to accomplish its sustainability goals, however, we must develop a lightweight and efficient vehicle. To do that, we established a vital partnership with 3D Printing Canada who recognized UBC Solar’s mission in engineering and innovation. With support through a Bambu Lab 3D printer and PETG filament, our team is able to rapidly speed up manufacturing to complete our vehicle.
With this equipment, our student engineers’ workflow benefits in several specific ways:
By utilizing the reliable hardware provided by 3D Printing Canada, we can drastically speed up our workflow for many critical items. Furthermore, UBC Solar gets the opportunity to localize our supply chain, drastically reducing our carbon footprint and shipping emissions that would otherwise be generated by outsourcing parts to overseas fabricators. We can design a component, print it with zero waste, and integrate it into the vehicle on the same day. For example: custom battery cell holders for our 416 cells, lightweight supports for our electronics in the battery pack, and 10+ enclosures for PCBs around our vehicle.
The PETG filament we use is a highly recyclable thermoplastic, making it an excellent choice when choosing a high-performance 3D printer filament. From experience, standard plastics would soften and warp under these conditions leading to failure of our vehicle. Utilizing these engineering-grade materials ensures that the PETG maintains rigid mechanical strength even when subjected to compounding heat, ensuring our car continues to travel down its 2,500km route!
Overall, UBC Solar’s students gain invaluable experiential education in sustainable design, systems thinking, and life-cycle analysis. Through the continued backing of 3D Printing Canada and the AMS’s Sustainable Projects Fund,, our team gets to prepare the next generation of climate-focused engineers and leaders to build a cleaner, zero-emission transportation future.
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